
Class J^^^I4 
Book. l' I L 



GoEyrightN". 



iO 



CDEmiCHT DEPOSm 



MADDALENA'S DAY 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 



A GRAY DREAM AND OTHER STORIES 
OF NEW ENGLAND LIFE 



MADDALENA'S DAY 

AND OTHER SKETCHES 

BY 
LAURA WOLCOTT 




NEW HAVEN: 
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS 

LONDON • HUMPHREY MILFORD • OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 

MDCCCCXX 






COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY 
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS 



Six of the sketches in this volume appeared formerly in 
the columns of the New York Evening Post and the 
Springfield Republican. 



M2i 1920 
©CI,A605077 



TABLE OF CONTENTS 



OUT OF THE PRESENT 



Maddalena's Day 








11 


Our Knight of the Lagoons 








97 


A Corner of Venice . 








35 


The Old Custode at Lucca . 








40 


The Spell of Pisa 








47 


A Footpath in Provence 








54 


November by the North Sea 








66 


Across the Centuries . 








72 


On Donkey-Back to Cape Sparte 


1 






83 



OUT OF THE PAST 



The Abbey's Legend .... 


97 


The Priest's Dilemma 


104 


The Iniquity of Midas 


108 


A Brief for Mistress Socrates 


112 


Cophetua and the Beggar-Maid . 


120 



INTRODUCTION 

1 HE sketches that make up this volume are 
all from foreign lands. Some of them are 
legends, after the manner of "Tanglewood 
Tales" told in light-hearted vein; — tales of 
"the olden, golden days of our dreams"; of 
Cophetua, for example, and the nameless beg- 
gar-maid "who have loitered hand in hand far- 
ther down the ages, giving and taking joy as 
they went, than any other crowned pair in 
Christendom." 

Another part of the contents is a group of 
present-day character-sketches full of charm 
and of sympathy, whether it is for little Mad- 
dalena "whirled and blown like a brown leaf" 
and rolling her ring of bread along the cobbles 
of the muddy Sicilian street; or for the old 
custode at Lucca reverently lighting his can- 
dles ; or for the little rabble of children in 
Venice who set out with a chanting funeral 
procession but turn back with the tambourine 
of the organ-grinder and his monkey. 

Some of the sketches are merely bits of de- 



8 INTRODUCTION 

scription — of Alkmaar, Hyeres, Tangier; but 
it is description that humanizes even the wan- 
dering footpath in Provence. The charm of 
Pisa is not in its Duomo, its palaces, its Campo 
Santo: "these are but things." The "spell" is 
in the dance of the barefoot children on the 
crowded street who symbolize the joy which is 
more than meat and raiment. "Let us eat and 
drink and sleep — for to-morrow we live again." 
The author, who lived a long lifetime in 
New England, journeyed in other lands as she 
dwelt in her own, finding all pathways lead out 
toward some rainbow's end. The sketches show 
a quick, glad sympathy with mankind in its 
many moods and settings — the sympathy that 
always brings response, and makes, as it goes 
on its way through the world, a little Eden of 
each spot it reaches. 

E. E. M. 



OUT OF THE PRESENT 



MADDALENA'S DAY 

T HE spring after little Maddalena was able to 
balance on both feet she began to fend for her- 
self. Lame Caterina, next door, was supposed 
to look after the little one when the mother was 
away. But as the spring grew beautiful more 
and more fine ladies came to go up and down 
the long street and look in at the little shop 
windows, and it was far better to go up and 
down after them begging soldi for the love of 
God than to be hobbling after a lively babe all 
day with only a handful of salad at evening for 
reward. 

So old Caterina rose when the sun streamed 
through the door crack and woke her, and had 
her washing strung against the dingy wall be- 
times — for every day of the seven is washing 
day in Sicily — and little Maddalena went her 
way in peace. 

Sometimes the road was too thick with 
donkeys, and then if no open door were near 
the little one came to old Caterina and hid be- 
hind her broad back, holding tight by her rough 



12 maddalena's day 

skirts. And when Bembo and Andrea quarreled 
and struck at each other with harsh shouts, 
picking up stones which flew recklessly any- 
where, she ran to the same refuge and hid her 
face in the folds of Caterina's clay-colored 
gown. But this was seldom, for doors were 
frequent, all standing open, and no one ever 
turned little Maddalena away. 

If Filippo had been digging up the ground 
inside his hut she sat down and hollowed a soft 
place for an olive branch or a twig of finely 
colored blossoms, making a little hill about it 
with her baby hands so that Filippo smiled as 
he stumbled over it in the dark and knew well 
whose work it was. 

The mother, Agata, had many odd jobs about 
the town which kept them in bread and salt; 
the salad she could always gather on her way 
home. Two years before the father had been 
carried out at the low doorway, with masses of 
flowers covering his bier and the sun shining 
for the last time on his uncovered face, the 
mother following with a tight little package in 
her arms that cooed and clutched at the flowers 
and patted Agata's thin cheek, wondering at the 
tears that wet her own little face and hands. 



maddalena's day 13 

Now Vincenzo was growing a great lad, able 
to look out for himself and his donkey as well, — 
the gray donkey that was every night tethered 
to the foot of the bed. The floor was of damp 
earth worn in hollows; but the bed was a fine 
one, and had a white cover with knitted lace a 
finger deep all around it. For the rest there 
was a table, which the hens usually claimed, an 
earthen bowl under it for the salad, a brown 
water jug, a broken chair, and a wooden cruci- 
fix on the wall. Long ropes of drying orange 
peel hung outside, against the door jamb, 
strung on an odd bit of picked-up twine and 
collected from — one never cares to know where. 
It was a brilliant day in Taormina, one of 
those mornings when one asks for nothing be- 
yond mere rapture of living. Agata had gone 
to scrub floors for an artist outside the old 
gate, and Vincenzo and his donkey were at work 
also. So little Maddalena had the whole, long, 
glorious day to herself. 

She sat in one of the smaller hollows under 
the table and fed the hens what few crumbs 
were left of her brown bread-crust, smoothing 
their feathers the wrong way and opening their 
bills as Agata often opened her own small 



14 

mouth to see if all the teeth were grown, then 
suddenly chased them out with great uproar, 
and looked about her for new amusement. 

Pietro and Nina were trotting down the 
street with basket and water jug and she ran 
toward them, throwing out her hands to beg 
for a game of tag. First they shook their 
heads, for stupid Pietro said Maddalena did 
not play fair. But Nina said. How could she, 
and so little? 

So each took a station, and when Nina set 
down her basket and Pietro lifted the water 
jug from his head and gave the word, Madda- 
lena ran under a donkey that was passing with 
a great load of brushwood that filled the place, 
and came out on the other side in time for her 
goal. Of course the others couldn't touch her 
— they were too big to creep under donkeys ! 

Then they tried once more; but the little 
brown feet winked so fast through the dust and 
dodged donkeys and carts and ran under elbows 
and before great baskets of artichokes that 
Pietro was sulky and wouldn't play. So Mad- 
dalena beat, and was glad, and when the two 
went away stood in the middle of the street un- 
certain which way to go. 



maddalena's day 15 

But a donkey driver whooped, and cut at her 
with his long whip, so she ran to the doorway 
and drew her little brown toes under shelter of 
the dust-colored frock, though she well knew 
that the whip wouldn't really hurt. 

Then the wind began to blow softly, and the 
little one spread out her apron and scudded 
before it like a butterfly on a dry leaf; and as 
it blew her that way she turned the corner 
toward the Greek theater that was so golden 
brown in the warm sunshine where the people 
sat and read, or strolled, looking off on Etna 
and the blue sea, or held sketchbooks and 
painted pictures. 

And just beyond the turn in the road in the 
shadows of a big wall some boys were playing 
hopscotch, and she looked long and wistfully at 
them, walking backward, both hands behind 
her and harking with all her might for an invi- 
tation. As no one thought of it she suddenly 
ran in and made two or three jolly little hops 
by herself. 

Just here Vincenzo came by with his loaded 
donkey and snatched her up to sit in the midst 
of the pretty greens. So she rode all the way 
along the lovely sea path to the great hotel 



16 

where the donkey's load was going to help make 
a dinner for the ladies and gentlemen in fine 
clothes who did not live on bread and salted 
salad, but had many things beside and sat at 
table to eat. Vincenzo said so, and he knew. 

The donkey paced soberly beside his master 
and none of the three looked up at the gray, 
craggy mountains or green depths they had 
always seen without seeing. Gray Mola 
perched a thousand feet above their heads like 
a nest of brown-winged bats — Mola, kept sweet 
in its pinching poverty and awful uncleanliness 
by pure winds blowing over it. 

But little Maddalena saw only the pinky 
almond blossoms over the wall which made the 
roadway bitter-sweet. So Vincenzo broke off a 
great branch for her, and two ladies looked up 
in passing and smiled their admiration, though 
they did not see the little brown hand held out 
for a soldo. Few people did — perhaps because 
it was so little. Maddalena did not care, only 
it was the custom; and she was trying to learn 
the whine from the old beggars by the theater, 
it was so queer. Vincenzo thought it was the 
whine that brought the soldi; but Maddalena 
didn't think at all. She was too little. 



17 

All the way to the great hotel the almonds 
blossomed like a pinky-purple sea, and far down 
beyond the green fields the real sea rolled softly 
inshore into lapis-lazuli greens and gleaming 
yellows outside the curling white foam it took 
back again from the sands. 

Just ahead ran Pietro and Nina, calling after 
the ladies who had smiled at Maddalena with 
her almond bough. Pietro held a shred of 
ragged brown-black tassel that he had picked 
up by the roadside which he was offering with 
frantic prayers for a soldo. But the ladies had 
no need of the tassel which was a poor little tag 
from some faded wrap, and rich as they must 
have been they put nothing into the four grimy 
hands which waved before them insistently for 
a long, long way. So the two turned back un- 
discouraged, to catch the next group that came 
to overlook the sea and thank God for the day. 

Just by the Fishermen's Path leading down 
awful, crooked steeps to the road like a thread, 
where boats went rolling out of the rainbow- 
colored grottoes, Vincenzo lifted little Madda- 
lena down and went on with his donkey. For 
awhile she rolled pebbles down the rocky path, 
and laughed and clapped her hands as they 



18 maddalena's day 

went hopping from point to point. Then she 
beckoned to a broad goat below; but Jacopo 
had laid down his crook and Pan pipe and was 
cutting up huge cactus leaves for his flock, so 
they had serious business on hand, and not even 
a kid responded to Maddalena's cheerful invi- 
tation. 

Just beyond the great hotel clung to its crag, 
solidly walled up underneath, and far below gay 
parties were roaming out to the grottoes, riding 
high on crests of waves that foamed white about 
the bows. 

There were no playmates here for the little 
one since the goats declined to come, so she 
stopped to press her small face to the great 
gate of Santa Caterina, now a lovely dwelling 
where a fountain is always playing in the wide 
court of roses, and the gardens are like one's 
dreams of Paradise. The gardener smiled at 
Maddalena — as indeed who did not? — and 
pushed some roses through the grating which 
the little hand closed on quickly. 

Etna was a brave show this morning, with 
its head lifted high above the clouds that bil- 
lowed below like those of Raphael about his 
cherubs. Somewhere out of sight a lark was 



maddalena's day 19 

singing and little Maddalena sang too, swinging 
her arms high abo\^e her head and skipping 
along as children did who had jumping ropes. 
The sun was getting high when she came up the 
steep cobbles to the town gate, running after a 
nanny-goat, stopping to pat a little black and 
white kid or holding fast by a kind donkey's 
tail. 

In the marketplace many little kids were 
hanging head downward, stripped ready to be 
cooked, and Maddalena looked the other way, 
their eyes were so big and staring. Paulo had 
just bought one for his master and was setting 
it up on his arm like a big, uncanny doll. He 
thought Maddalena would laugh when he talked 
and sang to it, but she did not, and when he 
called "Maddalena ! Maddalena !" she ran away. 

And because her feet had turned that way 
early in the morning, they turned the same way 
now, the uphill road to the Greek theater. 

Old Tito was hammering away at a shoe, 
putting a thick patch on its worn sole, and 
three ladies were straying along looking at 
beads and trinkets and embroidery dangling 
outside every window. So Maddalena whose 



20 

feet were tired at last sat down in the road and 

looked on. 

Farther on, almost at the gate of the hotel 
at the foot of the theater, two or three children 
were dancing to a hurdy-gurdy, and the little 
one jumped up and joined them forgetting that 
she had ever been tired. Such brown, beautiful 
feet that twinkled in the dusty road, the taper 
ankles colored gently, like new chestnuts, more 
kissable — if washed — than those of the great 
Venus herself. The dust-colored frock with the 
Madonna-blue apron reached almost to them, 
and a bit of red petticoat made a line of bright- 
ness that went and came as she danced. 

The same lame beggars were sunning them- 
selves on the curbstone, five in a row, like dingy 
old sparrows in every stage of ragged moult 
and missing feather, and Maddalena sat down 
with them and played with their crutches and 
rode horseback on Andrea's staff with the 
carved head, and tried old Cecco's whine; and 
one gray woman whose wits were all gone save 
one, patted the pretty head under the faded 
pink kerchief and said she had a baby once if 
she hadn't forgot, and rubbed the sand and 
pebbles from the little feet with her knobby old 



21 

hands. So Maddalena reached up and stuck 
her drooping roses into the white hair that 
straggled from its yellow covering, and not one 
of them all smiled at the silly picture it made. 

The shutters of the photograph cabinet were 
up, for it was now high noon, and the boy 
Tomaso in charge lay fast asleep face down on 
a pile of stones. Maddalena stood on tiptoe to 
look at him, touched him gently with one finger, 
picked up his cap that had fallen to the ground, 
laid it on his curly head and trotted on. Many 
people were coming down from the theater, and 
as little Maddalena peeped in through the gate 
she bethought her of the new whine and held 
out both hands. And lo, a soldo! It was high 
time, for the breakfast crust was a little one. 
So laughing and chattering to herself she 
pattered back along the road looking out for a 
loaf that would fit her penny. 

Great rings and rounds and bars of bread 
lay everywhere out of doors, and ragged men 
were lounging over them, trying them to see if 
they were soft anywhere, and Luca was fast 
asleep in his chair, his head resting on both 
arms that protected the loaves, his yellow cat 
curled up in one elbow. At last, under strings 



22 maddalena's day 

of peppers and ropes of sausages and poor 
stripped kids staring at nothing with round, 
awful eyes, she spied a very little ring and hold- 
ing tight to her penny begged for it. She was 
starving and had no breakfast, and half believ- 
ing her because she was a baby, old Simone in- 
side the shop put the bread reluctantly into 
her hands. And then to his joy the soldo lay 
revealed in the little open palm and the old 
man crossed himself as he took it and laid it 
away for the Virgin. 

On went the little one to the four corners 
where a fifth road crept up from below, and she 
had to put her curls out of her eyes and look 
sharp for donkeys. She would take her bread 
home and sit down as they did at the great 
hotel and eat it at the table. But first she 
would try how well it could roll ; and it was just 
perfect. It hopped over the cobbles and 
skipped a little clayey run and bumped into a 
cart wheel till the child laughed aloud in her 
joy, and at last lay flat in the road just in 
time for a donkey to fit his small hoof into it. 
Then indeed Maddalena cried out for fear ; but 
Niccolo stopped his donkey and pulled off the 
ring. Once more it was safe, hanging like a 



maddalena's day 23 

brown bracelet from her arm past the shop 
where yellow and blue and pink kerchiefs strung 
above the door made a bright resting place. 
But dinner must wait for home. And when she 
got there Vincenzo had been before her and 
hitched the donkey to the bedpost and gone 
again. 

Maddalena was glad of company, and so was 
the donkey, for he loved the child well. She 
played no tricks on him, she never punched him 
with sharp sticks or struck him with a stinging 
whip. So he bent his head down and let her 
rub his nose. But when she offered him the 
first bite of her loaf he only smelt of it and 
meditated. So she sat down close beside him 
and ate all but a small portion which she re- 
served for the hens and her mother. 

She leaned out and looked up and down the 
road, but nobody was coming with a water jar, 
so she ran to the Madonna fountain where many 
women were spinning with distaffs as they 
walked to and fro ; and climbed up to drink 
from the stream that was always ready and 
that dripped over her little bare toes. For a 
moment she stopped to look in on the circle of 
nut crackers whose hammers made such tinkling 



24 

music, and crowding between them sat on the 
heap in the middle of the ground floor and 
kicked the nuts with her brown heels. The 
women all knew her, for every day when the 
nuts came in Maddalena came too. So they 
teased her and petted her and said she was 
growing a great ragazza and soon she would sit 
on the ground, too, and crack nuts all day long 
with sore fingers, and much might she like it. 
Little cared Maddalena, for her time was not 
yet come. 

In the doorway sat pretty Anita, knitting a 
blue stocking with her five long, crooked needles. 
But when Maddalena pulled at her skirts she 
stuck the ball and stocking on the needles and 
the needles in her hair and balancing the water 
jug beside them took the child's hand and 
started for the fountain. Once this had been 
a mermaid with a pretty, curly tail, but long 
ago the poor pious folk wanted a Madonna, 
and so put a crown on its head. Thus like 
many another idol it had its humorous side. 

After Anita had filled her jug she went 
knitting along the road, while Maddalena took 
a pinch of her skirt and ran close behind her 
when the laden donkeys crowded them to the 



25 

wall, or the cart wheels jolted too near their 
bare toes. 

There were great baskets of beans in the 
doorways, broad and yellow, and boiled chest- 
nuts in wooden bowls, and fish on boards, and 
bread nailed to the door jambs, and macaroni 
hanging like veils overhead. But when Anita 
reached her home she, too, had to join the nut 
crackers, and Maddalena had had enough of 
them till to-morrow. 

Great black clouds were piling up along the 
mountains and the wind came sweeping down 
from above, flapping into a mad dance the 
garments that had been all day drying on the 
walls, and curling the dust up into great white 
clouds. So little Maddalena with homing in- 
stinct scampered for her own refuge, whirled 
and blown like a brown leaf but always keeping 
a straight course till she came in sight of old 
Caterina's patched blues and reds prancing 
high above the wall and her mother's strings of 
orange peel flying like tethered kites across her 
own doorway. Torrents of rain followed close 
behind two nimble little heels, the brown hens 
flew squawking in before her, and little Madda- 
lena was safe at home. 



26 maddalena's day 

An hour later barefoot Agata trudged 
sturdily through the mud, a great apronful of 
dandelion leaves on her head, and under them 
a brown loaf. As she stooped to the dim en- 
trance the room grew lighter by degree^ and 
she saw first the bed-cover shining white above 
the deep pools of water, then the gray donkey 
bending his head like a guardian angel over 
little Maddalena, who lay under him fast asleep, 
with both chubby arms clasped around his leg. 



OUR KNIGHT OF THE LAGOONS 

OlR," said he, "within short space ye shall 
know that I am of god kin." "It may well be," 
said Sir Kay, the seneschal, "but in mockage 
ye shall be called La Cote Male Taihy that is as 
much as to say the evil-shapen coat." 

It was in Chioggia that we met him. He 
might have sunned through twelve unvarying 
years, but with the air and dignity, if not the 
substance, of a man. Pushed well back from 
his brown forehead sat a thing of slits and 
tatters and fringed brim whose origin was lost 
in dumb antiquity. His garments, of no 
special color or texture, though diverse and 
crying for scores of pins, were worn with the 
unconscious ease and dignity of a decayed don. 
There was wholesome pride in his bearing — the 
pride of ancestral garments if not of ancestry. 

We were doomed, from the instant he re- 
garded us with a casual eye. Never was meas- 
ure taken more swiftly, more adequately, more 
deftly. "Not the tempest, but the sun," was 
the legible motto in that one gleam of his eye. 



28 

He was as sure as fate against all prophecy, all 

mental reserves. 

He had some pescatori or other on his in- 
destructible tablets; some black bit of picture; 
some guesses at Bellini hidden from the multi- 
tude; some chiesa molto grande; some boat with 
rainbow sails ; some surpassing view. 

We could not hear. 

He paced silently beside us, a little removed, 
cannily unconscious, intent on his own thoughts. 

We craved the joy of being for once let alone, 
of finding out things for ourselves. Every ob- 
ject of interest in Venice had been pointed out 
to us, insisted upon, until the sensitive surfaces 
of the brain were bruised. Venice was one huge 
composite of pictures archaic and middle-aged, 
of altars, rood-screens, pulpits, baptisteries, 
pillars, miracles, Ruskin's must-be's, bad and 
good legends, beheaded doges, crime and tri- 
umph, dazzling color, weirdest gloom. 

We had looked forward for days to the de- 
light of learning, by our own processes, about 
Chioggia. Was it more than one long, arcaded 
street with shops of poor little wares languidly, 
piteously displayed ; with flyey fruit-stands full 
of sticky sweets ; with tables of wooden things. 



OUR KNIGHT OF THE LAGOONS 29 

cotton things, linen things, woolen things even; 
with dingy windows full of cooking utensils — on 
this day when the food of the gods seemed the 
only possible thing, in remote woodlands by 
cool streams ; with blankets and aprons and 
clumsy garments hung to catch the eye and 
casually shut out the air of this supreme July 
afternoon? — And we found out. 

There was always our special Mordecai in 
the background, not for an instant to be lost 
out of mind. Still he was small, and could not 
hide ravishing views of crooked cross-streets 
with here and there an arch for an old woman 
to mend her nets under; with roofs dripping 
vines from unseen, undreamed-of gardens ; 
shaded doorways with rickety family tables 
propping up tumblers of water tempered with 
Chianti; a dog curled up in the sunshine; a man 
sleeping at full length on the curb ; a flutter of 
grayish garments drying on the wall enlivened 
by a splash of red or harlequin jacket; and a 
glitter of the sea glorifying the far, dark end. 

Again and again we lost ourselves — but never 
our little knight ! Once only, when his attention 
was diverted by a kicking donkey and the con- 
sequent crowd, we slipped guiltily into a church 



30 

hung with votive hearts and crutches, and sat 
long in the still semi-coolness. But a hand we 
knew by heart was quietly ready to draw aside 
the leathern curtain when we tiptoed hopefully 
out. The tattered hat by courtesy was perked 
up in front for surer vision. He had a prettier 
church. 

But we would not see it. 

He left us with no remonstrance of face, 
figure or gesture; but as he came to heel we 
knew that we were two weak flies enmeshed in 
a web, bound foot and wing to a system where 
individual struggling draws the bonds closer. 

To our knight we were worse than the infidel 
in our cold disregard of sacred things, though 
with a possible final chance of salvation for 
which he watched, "unhasting, unresting." 

In desperation we went nearly to the old city 
gate, waving aside mute entreaties of attitude 
whenever a church loomed up hopefully; but 
the sun beyond the heavy old arcades was cruel, 
and we turned back to the cafe at the water's 
edge, at last, that we might be refreshed under 
an awning and watch for the coming of our 
boat that would divide the golden stream be- 
tween us and the dream city on the edge of the 



OUR KNIGHT OF THE LAGOONS 31 

world and leave us to unbroken visions as the 
evening glowed and cooled about us. Here at 
last we dropped our burdens, which were our 
suffering selves, and would gladly have loosed 
our shoes, like Ahasuerus. 

And here something like tardy compassion 
found us off guard at last. It had been gently, 
most gently, suggested that there was still time, 
before our knight discreetly, delicately, re- 
moved himself some paces with truest courtesy 
that he might not look upon our feast, hitching 
his rags into needed relations, and nibbling a 
casual straw as digester to some apocryphal 
meal. 

The unthinking moments were slipping away 
into an unrecallable past. One of us looked up, 
then the other. The low sun shone full on a 
little brown face turned away in doubt at last. 
It was no longer that of our knight of the la- 
goons ; it was only that of a sadly disappointed 
little boy. He had pinned his faith to a kindly 
human nature that had no real substance, and 
the very fabric of confidence was in tatters that 
his garments symbolized. The brave corners of 
his mouth drooped, his eyes so softly brown 
glistened, the muscles of his cheek fell, and 



32 

something shone in a deep channel it had un- 
wittingly made for itself. He had done his 
utmost and failed absolutely. He had ex- 
hausted his resources only to be outwitted by 
two selfish, well-fed children of Adam. He was 
hungry. We had eaten in his presence. The 
brutality of it struck home to us like a mailed 
fist. 

We missed the boat ; we said we did not care. 
What was one more sunset even on the Venetian 
lagoon.? We had sent darkness into one eager 
little heart. We would go home in the dark. 

We sat him down at our now bare table, and 
in scanty Italian bade him order what he would, 
while we conjured up some futile errand or 
other to pass the time, that his courtesy might 
not shame us. When we came back he had 
already supped on brown bread and black coffee 
and was waiting, standing alert, girded up and 
ready. 

His face radiated joy; his very tatters flew 
pennons of triumph. He dragged us through 
the sunshine with a visible dumb fear in his eyes 
that the boat was coming. We dismissed the 
fear, and his countenance shone. He flew us 
over bridges, he ran us into churches. The 



OUR KNIGHT OF THE LAGOONS 33 

very sacristan was astonished, and snatched up 
the smoky, rickety curtains with unseemly 
haste. Not that there was anything special to 
be seen, or worth while if it could have been. 
But it was our knight's hour of triumph and 
the very earth thrilled with it. In his throb- 
bing brain and heart he saw visions of impos- 
sible churches crowded with mouldy saints. 
The rapture in his soul obscured every faculty, 
every sensation save one. 

The time was short indeed, even now; but he 
remembered perhaps how weeds make up for op- 
portunity and round out their seeds in haste. 
Chioggia was a map that he unrolled and 
spread out before us — a world of which he was 
at present the custodian. It embraced the 
fishing fleet on the lagoon whose sails were not 
yet unfurled. Presently, he assured us, they 
would bloom like flowers of the garden in orange 
and blue and red. 

The two old pescatori grinned as he dashed 
us at them and rolled out the names of their 
catch. But they were already packing away 
their few tokens and remains, and knew well 
that we preferred not to see them. Three small 
panfish of unknown species, a few mussels in the 



34 

bottom of a basket, and a slippery, scaly board, 
were all that was left to be commented upon in 
the softest Italian and with sublimest faith. It 
had been a great catch. Like the best joys of 
many of us, all was in the past tense. 

Too soon the steamer touched the dock; and 
as we dropped heavy soldi into the grimy, un- 
resisting hand of this scion of an unscrubbed 
race, he nodded his head at us with a cheerful 
sense of ultimate possession; and by the light 
of his eyes we knew that if we came again years 
hence, when la cote male taile itself was lost in 
universal dust, we should find the core of it all, 
our knight sans peur et sans reproche, waiting 
for us at the water's edge, in an archaic leisure 
forever lost out of our more prudent world. 



A CORNER OF VENICE 

1 HERE is a small, historic canal in Venice, 
winding its short way between the Grand Canal 
and that of the Giudecca. Standing midway, 
one sees the high beaks of gliding gondolas on 
the one hand, and on the other the tall masts 
and orange sails against the pale background 
of the old Giudecca palaces. 

It was across this narrow rio that the devout 
little princess helped of the Virgin walked dry- 
shod when the gondoliers were forbidden to take 
her to the tiny church long called by her name, 
San Vio, where she "wasted all her time" before 
its altar. 

Here is none of the glamour of the Grand 
Canal, with its stately, leaning palaces, its gay 
gondolas, and busy traffic; but in its place the 
unadulterated life of the people. Down the 
marble or stuccoed steps of the rio parapet to 
the canal itself mothers bring their babes for 
a dip, or launch some brown urchin in his tight 
shirt, tethered by calico leading strings, with a 



36 

broken box cover or bit of plank to bear his 
weight till he can swim alone. 

Here come the contadine in pink bodice, blue 
skirt, purple apron, and flowered slippers to 
stand on the lowest step and wash the rainbow 
garments which look no cleaner as they dry on 
the walls, but are always a joy to the eye if not 
to the imagination. 

When the tall ships come in the blue and 
white sailors throng the way with a worship- 
ing crowd at their heels — little hangers-on, 
drawn by any new sensation, fascinated by the 
wheezy strains of an accordion or the rattle 
and clang of a tambourine. Now it is man and 
monkey, and a tambourine struck under every 
window, and then held up for soldi; and the 
little rabble akin to the monkey, crust in hand, 
baby on shoulder, barefoot or clacking in 
sandals, hovering like happy cherubs, alive all 
over and shrieking with laughter. 

Now it is a funeral procession in the early 
morning ; the chanting priests making their way 
among the crowd, the crucifix leading, the tall 
candles tipping and dripping, the red-draped 
bier and red-gowned bearers, the little children 
with flowers, the two or three black-veiled women 



A CORNER OF VENICE 37 

neighbors, like those other faithful three, "last 
at the cross, first at the sepulchre," and a 
huddling host of little bare heads and pattering 
feet. The shouts and cries pour out of every 
narrow lane and doorway and make a weird 
Pilgrim Chorus as the priests go chanting on to 
the bridge, where they rise against the pale 
background of the Giudecca, black and white 
standard, crucifix, candles flaring yellow-white 
in the sunlight, red bier and red bearers, and 
mongrel, following throng, like some mediaeval 
canvas crowded with life and death hand in 
hand. 

Then come man and monkey again and the 
shrill little rabble pours back, every cranny and 
doorway contributing to its volume; and with 
shrieks of tumbling laughter, new with each new 
occasion, the little-great troupe sweeps on to 
the beat of the tambourine and the clink here 
and there of soldi on the fondamenta. 

In the early morning the gondoliers come 
with their boats, bringing cushions and carpets 
from some stronghold in the alley, polishing 
the brass horses, dusting the carpets, singing at 
their work lustily, with no thought of lazy 
sleepers, dreaming only of the glory of the 



88 maddalena's day 

morning. It is a new day; and life is fuller 
than in Eden. Italy never sleeps. There may 
be a siesta, a reposing of one's self at noonday, 
when the sun beats fiercest, but at night from 
farthest canal to noblest piazza all is music, 
life, great overflowing life, but hushed and 
reverent when the band plays. 

The night is dark, perhaps, but for the stars 
that shine down and quiver in the wide lagoon, 
and those other stars that twinkle at the gon- 
dola bows. But like great birds of passage the 
boats gather and lean toward the piazza where 
Florian's is always bright and the waiters slide 
noiselessly to and fro among the innumerable 
tables, and the band plays. 

The quietest of crowds fills the spaces beyond 
— whole families — two or three astonishingly 
young children perhaps holding by the mother's 
red or blue skirts or the corner of her orange or 
red apron, a round-eyed hamhino on her shoul- 
der or held in the angle of an arm that never 
tires. 

The music swells and falls and swells again; 
and on special occasions one might walk on the 
heads of the standing crowd. But there is no 
disorder, no noisy applause ; only a deep breath 



A CORNER OF VENICE 39 

of appreciation passing along like a ripple of 
the lagoon when its depths are stirred. 

The babes of our own land were bathed, fed 
hygienically hours ago, prayed with, prayed 
over, and soothed to sleep in soft beds by fairy 
tale or Scripture story; but these waifs of sea 
and sun, when the last gondola turns its prow 
homeward and the lights disappear, gnaw the 
crust that keeps their teeth so white and strong, 
cross themselves before any chance shrine, and 
curl up somewhere, somehow, to "repose them- 
selves" till the new break of day that holds so 
much mystery and delight in store. 



THE OLD CUSTODE AT LUCCA 

W E always thought and spoke of him as our 
old custode. Not on account of his years, which 
were many, but chiefly because of an unspoken 
tenderness for the childlike nature of the man 
as well as for the pathetic lines of face and 
figure — those patient, unresisting lines common 
to Italy, as if it were all in the Divine plan 
which it were atheism to set one's will against. 
He was small, and slight. His decent black 
habit, neat linen, and the dull finish of his shoes 
— even the careful way his scant, pale hair was 
combed around his thin ears below nature's wide 
tonsure — bespoke scrupulous attention to de- 
tails. We saw him first in the dim light of 
Lucca's noble Duomo, slowly carrying a too-big 
ladder, and lighting every little lamp before 
every shrine, great or small — an act of devotion 
that his guardian angel as well as we must have 
been quick to set down with indelible pencil. He 
made us think, with utmost reverence, of the 
Great Exemplar bowed under the weight of the 
cross. 



THE OLD CUSTODE AT LUCCA 4fl 

His pale eyes, set in thinnest white frame- 
work, did not look together at us, but collected 
their several rays after an instant. Perhaps 
that was why he never knew us if we absented 
ourselves for a day, but slowly remembered ; we 
were sure of it as the flitting smile came back. 
The dim old figure seemed too slight for the 
overpowering weight of the cathedral. Indeed 
it might well have been its fault that the back 
bent a trifle from the hips and the legs bowed a 
bit as if bearing heavy shoulders not his own. 

His services were never proffered, never sug- 
gested; but if we needed him he was always 
there. Coming in to rest from the glare of the 
streets in the cool dusk which was at first utter 
blackness we thought he was gone, possibly to 
his noonday meal, though we could never con- 
nect him with any grosser sustenance than the 
sacramental bread. Not so. As our pupils 
expanded in the wide dark dotted with altar 
candles like fireflies, we could dimly see a spirit- 
like figure carrying the cruel ladder tall enough 
for Hercules, or sitting in meek, devotional atti- 
tude near some out-of-the-way shrine ; and until 
we stood silently before him he did not look up. 



42 

Even then it was not with quick recognition, 
only a slow drawing into focus of his faculties. 

He accepted us as the forestieri who loved 
above all things in his sacred world the Ma- 
donna of Fra Bartolommeo, with its Saint 
Stephen — his half-turned-away face full of ex- 
quisite young sweetness — and its young Saint 
John, all dignity, beauty and grace. Our old 
custode, as he took down one by one the altar 
candles that we might have a perfect view, sat 
in quiet content and happy appreciation as 
long as we chose, never moving to draw the 
curtain until we passed out. 

Then, when we stood by the beautiful, re- 
cumbent figure of the young Princess Ilaria, to 
whose house belongs the stately Guinigi Tower 
with trees growing on its top, he told, in slow 
words adapted to our comprehension, the story 
of one too-young dead, lingering fondly beside 
the exquisite form with its tresses of hair 
loosened about the temples below the fillet as 
if a soft wind had blown them from their bands. 

In the same slow way he answered, one day, 
our question about the suspended iron grill in 
the nave which we in our frank ignorance had 
taken for Saint Lawrence's symbol. Far from 



THE OI.D CUSTODE AT LUCCA 43 

it. On holiest days its every point was wound 
with tow, lighted when the Bishop said, "Gloria 
in Excelsis," with a wondrous blaze — pouff! 
then dying away at the "Sic transit gloria 
mundi." The old man's hands fell and he stood 
an instant in reverie; then gently drew us 
toward the Tempietto of Matteo Civitale, not 
by word, scarcely by gesture; but before we 
were aware we were listening with strained at- 
tention to the story of this temple within a 
greater, built by "our Civitale, our sculptor," 
for the safe-keeping of the glorious Volto Santo 
miraculously brought to Lucca centuries ago. 

In simplest words of his mother tongue our 
custode courteously acknowledged our limita- 
tions, telling us how Nicodemus, that master in 
Israel, was minded to make a holy crucifix more 
than twice the height of a man, from a cedar 
tree of Lebanon ; how he fashioned with his own 
hands the cross and the seamless garment 
reaching to the feet, but dared not attempt the 
face. 

Then came the first miracle. While he slept 
an angel descended and carved a face of inef- 
fable piety and sweetness such as mortal man 
had never seen. It was secluded and carefully 



44 

shielded from harm until the year 782 when a 
pilgrim bishop instructed by an angel (the 
same, we wondered, who had carved the face?) 
placed it on board an empty bark at Joppa and 
committed it to the care of the sea. The bark, 
angelically guided, came to Luni, the old city 
near Spezia, where was Giovanni, Bishop of 
Lucca. But, this being naturally a matter of 
dissension, the people objected to its being 
taken away. 

At last they agreed that it should be put on 
a cart drawn by two white oxen, and that they 
would accept this guidance. Then, with a 
gleam of holy joy and a smile of childlike ten- 
derness, the old custode spread two fingers of 
his right hand, the one signifying the road to 
Spezia, the other to his beloved Lucca, and 
traced with another finger along the two the 
course the oxen took. And here is its home, as 
was Heaven's will, where come hosts of the de- 
vout from many lands to see the miracles 
wrought by it. The greatest day in Lucca's 
year is that on which the Volto Santo is shown 
to the adoring multitude, adorned with richest 
robe and priceless jewels lavished upon it by the 
faithful. 



THE OLD CUSTODE AT LUCCA 45 

The old custode's face brightened through 
all its lines of years and weariness as he showed 
us in a dim corner of the Duomo the picture of 
two hills — one where stood three faintly out- 
lined crosses, the other where vigorous men 
were hewing down a mighty tree. In the valley 
between, Nicodemus himself was designing the 
crucifix, and in the foreground two meek white 
oxen, broad-horned and powerful, were at last 
bearing it away in a cart, supported upright 
by the arms of the faithful disciple whom Jesus 
loved. 

It was the supreme effort of our old guide, 
and if his loyal spirit had gently burst its bonds 
and ascended before our eyes it would not have 
been out of keeping. 

So it was with no little anxiety that we 
looked for him next day to thank him in words, 
and in more substantial tokens — which he 
scarcely saw — for all he had done for us. The 
sum of it he will never know. But we might 
have had more faith after all our lessons; for 
he met us in the nave with a smile of recog- 
nition, so quickened were his own faculties by 
the great recital; went before us and drew, as 
so often before, the curtain from Fra Bartolom- 



46 

meo's glorious Madonna, removed the altar 
candles, and sat down patiently while we took a 
long last look, as one looks on a face never to 
be seen here again. His final fee lay slackly in 
one hand, and with the other laid on his breast 
he bowed us a courteous, prolonged addio. 



THE SPELL OF PISA 

Who can name the spell of Pisa, the En- 
chanting? You descend upon its snowy plain 
through uncounted tunnels that Dante should 
have prophesied — tunnels of darkness and 
smoke, and many of intolerable length — from 
which you trundle out breathless into scenes of 
dreamlike beauty. Point after point dips its 
intense greenness into the exaggerated blue of 
the sea. Walled roads climb up and up, zig- 
zagging among gray olives and black-green 
cypresses. A^ineyards on endless terraces are 
salad-green ; their tender vines droop from tree 
to tree, are woven from pole to pole. Scarlet 
poppies in the grass suggest the note of splen- 
dor for women's bodices, skirts, kerchiefs. 
Strong, gipsy-brown mothers and little children 
turn the hay, weed the crops, dig the soil, with 
gay laughter and little trills of song. Life is 
jubilant, unforeboding. 

Then comes the Pisan plain, with background 
of blue mountains, and in its midst the softly 



48 

flowing Arno, coming down from Florence 
yellow as the Tiber, curved here "like a delicate 
section of Giotto's O." 

On both banks rise the palaces of Pisa, noble, 
silent, like a dream of mediaeval glory. Little 
Santa Maria della Spina, with its cherished 
fragment of the Crown of Thorns, hangs on the 
yellow-brown wall like the chief jewel of a neck- 
lace, its tiny towers of carved marble like a 
child's toy against the mounting background 
of old palaces. In centuries past its Messa del 
Cacciatori (Mass of the Huntsmen) was cele- 
brated as early as two or three o'clock, that the 
Pisan might mount before daybreak with his 
soul duly strengthened and comforted. 

Pisa's churches are many and wonderful, 
built from spoils of the infidel. But this is not 
its charm. Neither can you find it in its fres- 
coed Campo Santo — the proud boast of its 
people ; nor in its Campanile that looks so fool- 
ish, so flippant in its regal beauty. Neither is 
it in the Duomo with its barbaric splendor; its 
Baptistery with the exquisite Niccolo Pisano 
pulpit whose porphyry pillars stand on lions — 
its rose-point marble discs of lace that it seems 
possible to lift, petal by petal. Nor is it in its 



THE SPELL OF PISA 49 

Chlesa dei Cavalieri — where in the sixteenth 
century the Knights of Saint Stephen vowed to 
rid the Mediterranean of pirates, to redeem 
Christian captives, and propagate the true re- 
ligion — with its banners of exquisite design, 
texture and coloring, its Saracen standards 
with the silver crescent, proud record of over- 
coming the infidel in the strength of faith ; nor 
yet is it in the gemlike della Spina which 
cheered the hearts and souls of mediaeval hunts- 
men before the chase. 

Its streets are white with dust; at noonday 
the glare is intolerable. But its river runs 
gently rippling between its walls ; its birds sing 
all day long; and the people, with happy, un- 
foreboding hearts, sing with the birds, and with 
as little care for to-morrow. The ragged, bare- 
foot children dance to the joyous hurdy-gurdy; 
the urchin trundling a heavy barrow stops to 
break off a bit of his bread-crust, hard as the 
nether millstone to Western teeth, taking his 
noonday meal as he goes, and whistling bits of 
classic song when it is done. 

The hard roll and the occasional flask of 
Chianti, these sustain life : and if by chance you 
meet a strong, brown old woman with her apron 



50 

full of salad gathered anywhere, she is probably 
cheering herself with a green leaf or two by the 
way. She can gather more as she goes, from 
the shadow of any wall. 

It is a fete day perhaps, and the bridges and 
municipal buildings are adorned with red, white 
and green banners. The crowd cheers at the 
heels of the band, which is playing the national 
air. But in place of the uproarious sounds we 
are accustomed to this is like the music of swung 
castanets. 

By day the Pisan palaces lie still as sleepy 
mediaeval towns in the Campo Santo frescoes of 
Benozzo Gozzoli. The strong, musical cry of 
the street vender rises like the chant of intoning 
priests. Does he learn it in the Cathedral? 
Has it filtered through his ducts and become an 
unconscious part of himself.'' 

At night the palaces wake and breathe again. 
Radiant life streams forth; great families meet 
other great families on the Lungarno, ex- 
change rapid greetings and go on to meet 
others, children and nurses in their train. All 
night the streets ring with happy laughter, 
sudden bursts of song like the startling trill of 
the nightingale invading one's dreams and 



THE SPELL OF PISA 51 

chasing away sleep, until one lies in quiet ex- 
pectancy, undisturbed, yet waiting and listen- 
ing. Does Italy never sleep? From midnight 
until the cheery whistle of the street-sweeper 
announces the dawn the tide rolls ceaselessly 
on. Toward morning it flags a little; there are 
shorter intervals between the patter of feet, the 
contagious laughter, the murmur of conversa- 
tion, the roll of wheels, the sharp snap of the 
whip. Then comes the steady scrape, scrape of 
the street cleaner, and lo ! a new day. 

Under the hotel windows, as the shadows 
begin again to lengthen, a hurdy-gurdy grinds 
out a quick measure. From everywhere, like 
Deucalion's crop, spring up little barefoot 
creatures ; some with dingy kerchiefs covering 
curly locks, some with two little bobbing, un- 
coiffed braids tied with twine. There are but 
three pair of shoes among the dozen and one 
pair of sabots which are kicked off to the gutter 
or sidewalk. 

The gay whirl begins, with soft laughter and 
irrepressible glee. People flock from barber 
shop and wine cellar; porters, hotel waiters, 
mothers, and jeering young brothers, till fifty, 
sixty bystanders ring the little wild group 



52 

around. The hoarse bray of the automobile 
scatters them for a moment as the great Jugger- 
naut nearly fills the street. It goes on and they 
form again, balancing, retreating, with butter- 
fly grace, these babes who have never been 
taught. Great mother nature keeps them so 
close to her heart that they learn all her 
mysteries. Now two of the littlest whirl 
against a somber gentleman who extricates him- 
self cheerfully. A bicycle scatters them, then 
a dull donkey cart, and again they flit like their 
cousin sparrows back of the protecting cause 
of their exquisite joy. Three jeering small 
boys who have looked on with patience clasp 
each other clumsily and attempt a triangular 
hop, but no one notices them. 

And how the babies dance ! Bare, dirty — oh, 
so dirty ! — thin little five-year-old legs ; blue 
skirts and red skirts, and skirts of no color, 
one split down the back, and others insecure of 
fastening. In pauses of the enchanting music 
to which they keep such perfect time, they fan 
their hot brown faces with their skirts, then go 
at it again. More people gather to thicken the 
circle; old women bent and dingy, young, 
strong mothers with babes for once wide awake 



THE SPELL OF PISA 53 

on their shoulders — a rainbow group, silent, 
ecstatic. 

Here, then, is the charm of Pisa in a symbol : 
— life which is more than living, joy which is 
more than meat and raiment. Children of earth 
and sun, happy with Greek abandon, sowing 
heedless of the reaping, standing tiptoe between 
yesterday and to-morrow. Intense for one glad 
moment, whether telling their beads in the mag- 
nificent Duomo, or leaping like baby fauns in 
the untrained joy of being, each sunrising 
makes a new day full of sweet surprises, each 
night closes the scene with the little flock hover- 
ing near gay promenaders on the Lungarno. 
At the brightly lit hotel many a tiny, gipsy 
hand is stretched for the soldi seldom refused. 

Let us eat and drink and sleep — for to- 
morrow we live again! This is the spell that 
binds us to Pisa, the well-beloved ; beside which 
her Tower and Duomo and Baptistery and 
Campo Santo, her Arno and her palaces are but 
things. 



A FOOTPATH IN PROVENCE 

Just a little lonesome footpath turning its 
back on the sea to climb these Mountains of 
the Moors. 

First a road formulates itself from the by- 
ways of the crumbling old town. The houses, 
herded together in a sort of arrested panic, 
look every way and reach across to each other 
helplessly. Dark, trenchlike ways lead past 
dens and holes in the walls where women dry 
rags and knit and children play in the trickle 
of ditch water that helps define the street. 
Horses of the better sort are stabled here. 
Human beings give them precedence, and oc- 
cupy whatever small space they do not require. 

The great plain lies beyond. Where the sea 
once swept are broad waves of color from mar- 
ket and flower gardens, and the constant smoke 
of the Vallauris potteries a mile and more away. 

But the old church of St. Paul, dating from 
the eleventh century, turns its back on all this 
as well as on I'Hermitage crowning a height 
across the plain, in hot haste to escape and 
climb the mountain side ; as if the old, maraud- 



» 

A FOOTPATH IN PROVENCE 55 

ing foes, or Hercules himself who often sum- 
mered here, were at its heels. "The church 
would be pretty if washed," says Monsieur 
I'Abbe, who shows its altars and votive offerings 
with modified pride. He is only a visiting Abbe 
from a town with a historic name and, let us 
hope, a cleaner church. 

The narrow, black streets flee along with old 
St. Paul's and push their way up the mountains 
that lie six hundred and fifty feet above the 
sea; and the burnt roofs of the houses, seen 
from above, cower and cling so close that they 
might serve for pavement. It is time that has 
charred them. Here and there a few reddish 
tiles break the monotony, but for the most part 
the old town is a fused mass of strange elements. 

From the hopeless tangle of crooked foot- 
ways that scarcely serve to divide the houses 
two start out with decision to explore the 
heights. One climbs quite into the open above 
the church, and getting its bearings hurries on 
to the chateau over a rocky path worn hollow 
as a cradle by the feet of forgotten generations. 

There are great views from the heights. But 
long before they are reached you come to a dead 
wall with all manner of creeping things growing 



56 

on and water falling over it ; — English ivy that 
has hurried to cover the unsightliness till it 
forgot to shape its earlier leaves, but remem- 
bered higher up to point and polish them with 
zeal. There they are as perfect and beautiful 
in shape as the Dryburgh Abbey variety that 
we cherish in pots at home. Solanum that blos- 
soms in lavender when its time comes crowds 
the ivy ; cacti of every degree push out at every 
crack and cranny and flourish on air and 
memory. 

It seems the end of this strange world, with 
ancient history at its feet and modern life dully 
spanning the chasm, when suddenly, like a 
miraculous creation, a man comes stepping out 
of the impossible Beyond with a flock of sheep 
— a harmless, sunburnt brigand in rags, with 
pointed hat and crooked stick, who responds to 
your hon jour with dignity. 

Another path lagging up to the left from the 
old blackened town stops to breathe on a level 
with the great white hotel that stands apart on 
a coigne of rock commanding the harbor and 
the sunny isles that shut it in. 

Here begins a roadway which you reach from 
the hotel's upper floor. But it is in haste to find 



A FOOTPATH IN PROVENCE 57 

the new town, and so curves past many a villa 
with enchanting terrace-gardens and mossy 
pools where lily pads float and frogs make night 
solemn — gardens whose soil is like the shale of 
the stone-breaker's refuse, above which roses 
bloom, and everything that has the breath of 
life praises the Lord in fragrance and color 
endlessly. 

Lingering past the upper garden gates of 
Ste. Lucie, whose walls are hidden by masses of 
purple passion vine, the roadway runs down 
under a bridge that spans it as if it were a 
stream, connecting the villa with Chalet La 
Solitude which rises from a sea of roses at high 
tide, and loses itself in the new town at the foot 
of the Avenue de la Pierre Glissante. In this 
chalet Robert Louis Stevenson lived amid sun- 
shine and roses, looking wistfully after lost 
health but losing nothing of the undying charm 
of plain and mountain and sea and the reckless 
waste of beauty and perfume — some of which 
he caught and stored up for all time in poems. 

Before the sharp descent comes a parting of 
the ways. Through olive and fig and mulberry, 
almonds in exquisite bloom, eucalyptus, beech 
and fir, runs and creeps and goes astray a path 



58 

such as a child, a dog, a wild goat might make. 
It has escaped from the highway's motherly 
leading strings, with all the glee of freedom and 
liberty at large. It thinks about nothing at all. 
It stops at a butterfly on a thistle, turns aside 
for a big rock, and forgets. It dips itself in a 
run of sweet water, dries itself on the warm side 
of a boulder, reaches up for the hard green figs 
hidden by greener leaves, pricks itself on the 
wild rose thorns, and sits down to consider. 

But this is the only thinking it does till it 
stands under the ruined walls far above, and 
looks out on the green-blue Mediterranean 
where ships of the French fleet lie at anchor. It 
steps over a clean little rill, tiptoes on sharp 
edges of stone that crops out endwise and is 
cruel to the foot, drops down to a little hollow 
where women endlessly wash clothes that are 
never clean and dry them on blossoming wild 
rose bushes, olive boughs, prickly vines — any- 
thing that is unresisting. 

The women respond cheerily to your bon 
jour with engaging, distant courtesy, but are 
distinctly interested in their work and only in- 
cidentally in your presence. If you choose to 
wander on with a difl"erent aim in life, to en- 



A FOOTPATH IN PROVENCE 59 

snare butterflies in the sunny meadow beyond, 
or idly collect ffeurs sauvages, it is of no inter- 
est whatsoever to them. They do not even 
suspect you of concealed plans under your air 
of indifference, but leave their scrubbed rags in 
the sunshine and sweet breeze with the faith of 
little children. 

The pretty pool left by a tiny crooked rill 
that shines in the grass and thick bushes, shaded 
by a great rock, cooled by tangled vines, and 
sung to by innumerable birds, is blue and frothy 
with soap, and will scarcely clear itself before 
night, its springs are so low. But it works 
vigorously, like any small thing under a hard 
master, with never a day of rest, and has great 
results. 

Here the path leaves the green coolness, and 
toils up and up to where a great rose garden 
suns itself on a broad slope. It is the magnifi- 
cent Gloire de Dijon, flowering like a daisy field, 
to be cut first for the Paris flower market, and 
later for the great perfumeries at Grasse, where 
its petals bring fifty francs per kilo. 

A dingy hut with irrigating well in its garden 
backs the path almost into the full brook that 
cherishes a lusty growth of greenness and a 



60 

horde of mosquitoes. By the well sits a super- 
annuated grandfather, sheltered under a clay- 
colored umbrella. He may be fifty years old, 
and has nothing to do but enjoy just living and 
basking in sunshine. 

He does not resent the path's intrusion, but 
it hurries past his artichokes and brown beans 
and lettuces like a silent apology, swings down 
a sandy stretch to the butterfly meadow, and 
runs on the very tip of the bank above the 
stream, which here settles into another pool, 
inviting women from the five-windowed house 
under the olives, who bring to it, like Egyptian 
princesses, head-loads of things to be pounded 
on the rocks and scrubbed against the flat 
stones, and afterward labored up with into the 
sunshine. The path cannot keep its balance 
down the steeps where they carry their baskets, 
but trots along contentedly like a little dog 
with no purpose ahead; passes here a window- 
less hut — for taxes are high in France; there a 
terraced garden; beyond, a grape vineyard 
severely pruned. 

Above all stand the Mountains of the Moors, 
with ruins of the old, old castle and walls as 
old that once shut it in, but break off now 



A FOOTPATH IN PROVENCE 61 

that their watch and ward are past to over- 
look the valleys and ponder on the ways of the 
ephemeral creature, man. 

Real grass and shrubs creep to the foot of 
the towers ; vines cling about them ; cedar, olive, 
fig, and mulberry trees slant below with grip- 
ping roots, to more terraces and one little 
deserted hut that the wild roses have adopted. 
Its blackened chimney is underfoot, with small 
respect from the conscienceless footpath; and 
as you look down on the closed door barred 
only by clinging vines you wonder what life 
passed under the silent roof and how. 

On goes the clue, and you follow in curves 
and sharp zigzags ; — flowers underfoot and 
overhead; blue things and white things and 
purple and lavender things and yellow and 
orange and deep red things, and everywhere, 
everywhere, the splendor of the scarlet poppy, 
as if heaven sent it down broadcast with the 
sunshine, among artichokes and beans with 
their gray- green leaves and purple noses. 
Here are green hyacinths past blooming, vio- 
lets with great shield leaves, cedars alone and 
in groups, and over all white and yellow butter- 
flies, and birds quivering with song. 



62 

Still below and beyond, at one corner of an 
endwise hut, a woman with red kerchief and 
yellow-bordered skirt, pushing a loaded wheel- 
barrow; and in the distance a donkey creak- 
ing like a pump. Underfoot a sloping roof 
three parts hidden in a eucalyptus grove with 
only a door to its name but with the sound of 
the brook always in its ears. When the mistral 
blows softly here, coming from far away, it is 
like wind in the rigging at sea. 

Below, but out of sight, lie the Gardens of 
the Hesperides. Far off, the bark of a dog 
guarding both sheep and goats — not separated 
as in Scripture, but shepherded together; and 
breaking in upon the remoteness the rattle of 
a donkey cart on the white Toulon road. 

It might be the cart of the deformed beggar, 
the great broad-shouldered, sun-black creature 
with long oily hair curling at the ends, who in- 
tones in the voice of a priest at every garden 
gate something that goes sounding on and on 
like a litany : **We have erred and strayed from 
thy ways like lost sheep, like lost sheep, like lost 
sheep.'* He is an uncanny sight, and the beg- 
gar whine hardens our heart like Pharaoh's. 
But a little yellow-haired urchin — his, per- 



A FOOTPATH IN PROVENCE 63 

haps — plays without fear in the unoccupied 
corner of the cart, and for its sake and senti- 
ment's, daily sous encourage the beggar in the 
sin of existence. 

Now the path halts a bit and sits down to 
rest among the crooked olive trees that no man 
thinks it worth his while to straighten, gets up 
again and tiptoes mysteriously to the knobby 
mulberries that are the most deformed of tree- 
creatures before their time of leafage. If only 
Mother Nature would as kindly cover her 
human children in this sunny spot where de- 
formity is cultivated like a reliable crop for the 
revenue it brings ! 

Over sharp stones the path lags tiredly up 
and up again among endless figs and olives and 
almonds, wild poppies, borage and myrtle, the 
yellow-green of the euphorbia and the pure yel- 
low of the marigold and the tiny imitation 
dandelion, to the House of the Sun Dial — a real 
house with two doors, with windows, with a 
gable even; and on the front it turns to the 
street a rude dial whose gnomon tells the hour 
with little more effort than one's own observa- 
tion. 

And here the path grows bewildered with so 



64 

much in prospect, stumbles over gnarled roots, 
slips over a shiny stretch of flat stone, and — 
like the animals in Leigh Hunt's "Tale of the 
Pig Driver" — "runs up all manner of streets." 
Unlike them, however, it comes back of its own 
accord to pause awhile at the top of its little 
world, to sit on the warm, slantwise rocks, and 
look about it. Down below in the cool, deep 
valley waters run and trees reach up to the sun, 
and the sound of a far-off tinkling bell is like 
falling water. 

There is a stir of human life too. Women 
must be always washing in this land (where no 
native is ever clean). The sight of a rill or the 
glisten of water in a peaceful pool inspires 
them. Boys are flying kites, holding together 
their heirloom shirts and trousers with one 
hand and guiding the distracted kites with the 
other. A queue of children, tapering down to 
babes, rolls and unrolls behind each happy 
owner of a thing of shreds and patches, tum- 
bling over each other with gleeful shrieks when 
the kite sails aloft like a broken-winged bird, 
sad and sympathetic when it drops among 
branches of tall trees or flutters hopelessly in 
the briers. Black-winged white swallows soar 



A FOOTPATH IN PROVENCE 65 

above and among the kites, and butterflies sit 
musing below on every thistle. 

Many footways start out here, leaving the 
old castle on the summit, and searching with a 
purpose for terraces, gardens, and the habita- 
tions of man. From below come small, homey 
sounds of human life — the careless song of a 
young girl, the barking of a dog, the click of a 
slow mattock, the creaking of a leisurely bar- 
row. To the west, above a cluster of red roofs 
that fill a distant gap between two black hills, 
shines the sea. 

But playtime is over. The business of life 
is serious, and no longer countenances delay. 
One look at crumbling Clos St. Bernard on the 
hillside below the castle and its walls, where tall 
oaks grow above the ruins, and our little foot- 
path leans back and runs and runs and runs 
over the slippery stones that slant to the valley, 
till it pulls itself up to round the corner, and 
there finds the other path — that of the flock of 
sheep and bandit shepherd — and together they 
jog decorously down the heights to the dingy 
old town. 



NOVEMBER BY THE NORTH SEA 

(A Fragment) 

If only I could tell of our trips to Leyden and 
Delft — of the pink and green and yellow toy 
houses beguiling the way with their toy gar- 
dens, where childish threads of canals fancy 
themselves footpaths and go sauntering among 
the nasturtiums and roses, and drawbridges 
are a mediaeval dream in small, shutting out 
nothing from next-to-no thing, but just en- 
chanting. And all along the way vivid green 
canals, and others spread with a red growth 
just as vivid; and clear ones with houses up- 
side down and blue sky at the bottom, and 
white ducks stepping in, stately, one by one to 
spoil the pretty picture with their own. 

We delight in this country, with its slim 
spirits of trees against the china-blue sky; its 
infinitesimal gardens crowding to the veriest 
edges of canals and overfull of chrysanthe- 
mums, dahlias, marigolds, geraniums, and roses 
ready to fall in ; ivy running all over Mary Ar- 
den cottages even to the chimneys; more gar- 



NOVEMBER BY THE NORTH SEA 67 

dens with dewy, full-blown cabbages in royal 
purple, like queens and kings on parade; wind- 
mills like ghostly clowns turning great hand- 
springs against the far-off blue, across polders 
gray and misty, with great spaces of light 
trembling down from the stars and not yet a' 
there! 

And such human beings ! A real Aunt Jane 
stepping out of an unseen planet, with high 
crimson plumes waving above a scrap of green 
velvet on wires, poised and actually tied under 
the chin. And under all this the loveliest old- 
lace cap with gold frontlet and long pendant 
pins! And just behind her a young creature 
with strong boots and a short blue skirt, and 
cheeks like Baldwin apples, in a cap of exquis- 
ite pillow-lace handed down for generations 
probably, falling to the shoulders, and a yellow 
straw bonnet — bright yellow, on my honor — 
perched above it, with flying streamers like an 
oriflamme — a thing to make the gods weep. 

A bare little steamer lay asleep one day on 
the Zuider Zee waiting for cargo, its captain 
and "conductor" and engineer laying their 
heads visibly together in the little glass house 
where most of their day is spent. Two young 



Dutch maidens with large baskets seemed to be 
our only fellow- travelers. The three men in 
the glass house with infinite leisure concen- 
trated their English and brought the common 
stock to me, spelling out zeemeouws when I 
asked the Dutch name of the birds darting and 
complaining over our heads. Why do we call 
them gulls? Pure poverty of language? But 
I forgot and asked far less simple questions, 
which puzzled them and sent them back under 
cover for consultation. 

Near Zaandam a lovely old woman appeared 
in a perked-up straw hat absolutely bare, no 
band even, an indescribable object with high, 
small crown and brim curved to its top — just 
a blocked-out Thing "without purpose or fore- 
ordination." 

It was just here that the windmills went mad, 
thirty-two prancing at a time in more ways 
than seemed reasonable before our very eyes, 
one at the end of the canal like a gray seer wav- 
ing us off. Such great arms painted in lines 
of black and white and bright blue, with sails 
of red and yellow, red and green, brown, or- 
ange and black, all blown about by the breath 
of some invisible spirit, for the balmy air had 



NOVEMBER BY THE NORTH SEA 69 

no edge even, no pushing quality. And still 
they fulfilled their destiny, and ground and 
ground. What a pity that we can't be orna- 
mental as we grind ! 

We sailed from canal to meer, from meer to 
canal, with Boer houses below us in clumps of 
trees, individual canals leading to their doors; 
red roofs, crystal-clear windows, and flowers in 
them all. No wonder men were tulip-mad in 
this land! Great reeds, twice a man's height, 
bowed on the banks as we passed, with the 
sound of wind in a pine forest. And how beau- 
tiful they were in their russet browns ! Blan- 
keted cows and horses, pigs and sheep, fed on 
the great soft polders, with sails breaking in 
here and there like spirits of ships aground. 

At last we reached Alkmaar. The captain, 
the conductor, and the engineer in concert 
deputed a man from below to pilot us ; and we 
set off, in that speechless fashion that makes 
one furious with the Babel builders, past Dutch 
houses so little and queer and many-colored 
that I longed to bring one home for a doll- 
house. They all had step-gables (corbie- 
steps), and Dutch babies ran about in funny 
caps, and all the shop windows were full of 



70 

gingerbread men; so I knew it was just a fairy- 
book, and somebody had set me in it unbe- 
knownst. 

When at last we came in sight of the Weigh 
House, remarkably like the Hoom picture, I 
dismissed our pilot with a silver blessing; and 
we wandered among millions of barrows and 
mountains of cheeses, from grapefruit size to 
red and yellow globes as big as a man's head. 
Men in blue blouses — ^bright, and faded, and 
patched, but always blue — with Alpine hats of 
yellow, red or green, caught up the piled bar- 
rows and trotted with them to the Weigh 
House, unless they fell out by the way and came 
to blows, which occasional^ happened, when 
the yellow balls rolled off dangerously near the 
canal amid the jeers of bystanders — the one 
understandable tongue. All along the banks of 
the canal stood gigs of the centuries, yellow and 
high-backed, with caleclie front like our great- 
grandmothers' sunbonnets, in which the cheese 
had come to market ; and men were lading canal 
boats after the weighing, tossing two at a time 
from barrow to boat where the catchers never 
once missed. 

A woman with unlimited good will silently 



NOVEMBER BY THE NORTH SEA 71 

plucked me by the sleeve and drew me away 
from a moving drawbridge, pointing to the 
Weigh House steeple where on the stroke of the 
hour something came out and did something. 
But it was high up, the sun was in my eyes, and 
I knew all about cuckoo clocks and Berne bears. 
Still I thanked her kindly, for she had the 
proper spirit and was quite above pourboires. 

We came home quite commonplacely by 
train. One sun-bright window cheered me out 
of the dark as we drove home. A broad, fair 
vrouw, in lace cap and golden helmet, was 
pouring tea from a sparkling heirloom that 
might have come all the way down from Willem 
the Silent. Truly, as I looked up to that shin- 
ing second floor, I thought her out of doors till 
I caught a glimpse of the window frame. 

All that night I dreamed of windmills small 
and great setting out to sea, with a strong fol- 
lowing wind. 



ACROSS THE CENTURIES 

IT was on a gentle sea that we sailed from 
Gibraltar to Tangier. But it was midwinter, 
and the passage not well spoken of by recent 
travelers. 

We had risen by starlight, too early for cabs 
to be in demand, and followed our luggage- 
bearers as in a dream to the quay, meeting a 
dense throng of Spaniards coming in for work 
from the mainland. 

From a tangle of boats floating in the harbor 
our guide chose for us, and before we reached 
the side of the Spanish steamer we saw the 
dawn come up out of the sea and flush the edges 
of England's stronghold. As we crept close to 
the shore green hills rolled endwise toward us 
and lost themselves in the Straits, most sym- 
metrically rounded and smoothed, with little 
"Christmas trees" marking owners' boundaries 
far up the slope. 

The day grew too gray for beautiful effects ; 
gray sea, gray sky, with grim Pillars of Her- 
cules behind us, and white Tarifa gleaming 



ACROSS THE CENTURIES 73 

ahead like a dream. But as we passed slowly 
by it dropped back against its hills, spread out 
its low gray ruins and became only a line, irreg- 
ular and broken but no longer picturesque. 
Then our course changed suddenly and Tangier 
came out like a magic picture from its rough 
setting. We were sailing backward across the 
centuries on our own ocean. 

Above the steep green approach beyond the 
mole rose tower and minaret and the dull blues 
and reds that gave bits of color to the torrent 
of gray-white that flowed down into the ravine, 
spread out and rose again to the ascent, then 
fell slowly away, a spent stream, to the sands 
that round the Bay of Tangier. 

A clamorous throng filled the great quay — a 
leaf torn out of the Bible. Sturdy Andrews 
and Simon Peters tucked up their brown ja- 
housies and plunged into the water to bring 
their loads of fish ashore. John-the-Baptists 
with sad, beautiful eyes were shoved aside that 
Judas and Barabbas might seize the bags and 
rugs and weariful belongings of the travelers, 
wrangling over their share and snatching at 
that of others in a tongue as empty of meaning 
for us as ours for them. 



74 

A city with no sound of wheels, only the 
patter of bare feet, of sandaled feet, and the 
tiny hoofs of donkeys. Along the endless quay 
to the old wall we followed our porters, through 
its dingy gate and dingier footway, over hard, 
jagged paving stones and muddy rills, past 
wells like that of Sychar, where Arabs in rags 
were filling water jars and goatskin bottles 
that lay in the mud beside them, dipping them 
slowly, and dripping away with them, past 
overloaded donkeys and stately Moors and Nu- 
bians and tall Soudanese to a white walled villa 
at last, overlooking the sea and the Riffl Moun- 
tains at the right. 

Along the sands twenty feet below our court- 
yard and Moorish arbor paced an endless pro- 
cession of donkeys — donkeys in gray, donkeys 
in brown, donkeys in indescribable sunbaked- 
clay color. Drivers ran beside them, bare- 
legged boys and men with red fez and white 
turban and rags most picturesque through 
which the sweet air of Tangier is always blow- 
ing. Camels paced by on their slow way to the 
marketplace, and always donkeys and more 
donkeys. A few saddle horses with English 
riders trotted along the verge of the sand, 



ACROSS THE CENTURIES 75 

many just inside the slow line of the creeping 
tide. 

Two Arabs in white burnouses trained beau- 
tiful ponies that plunged head downward, mak- 
ing short runs and long sweeps around their 
masters, rearing, backing, racing like colts let 
loose. Two dervishes with wild shouts whirled 
and embraced, and still the donkeys paced by. 
But when the day's work was done and the 
heavy panniers emptied, beasts and men by 
the score rushed out to meet the waves ; the 
donkeys thrusting their noses deep in as if tak- 
ing great breaths of the sea, then standing to 
be beaten upon and washed — is not the sea 
made on purpose.? — while the men scrubbed 
their own legs and feet that had run ceaselessly 
all day. 

With the night the great Riffl Mountains 
shone with their own stars; little hidden clay 
huts and thatched coverings up and up among 
the olives and oranges and live oaks, each with 
its own firefly spark. Miles and miles up 
weary, rough paths go donkey and man from 
the marketplace. And not only these but 
women and children ; old, old women barefooted, 
with legs bound in coarse canvas, who have car- 



76 maddalena's day 

ried eucalyptus cuttings on their heads since 
early morning, and are tramping back to what- 
ever they may call home. 

And with them are silent young women with 
bare legs and covered faces; and beautiful 
children with bright eyes and flesh the color of 
new walnut, rich with sun, let alone to ripen 
into old leather; hoary brigands riding loftily; 
and beggars more picturesque than Lazarus, 
and more gifted at asking alms. 

The soft, sweet air blows over them all alike, 
Heaven's own compensation, and they live in 
glorious defiance of germs that destroy dainty 
folk. Life is life, and why should they consider 
the worm? 

It is only in the holes and crevices of cities 
that we wonder if God made them. Here they 
are part and parcel of the landscape — awful 
mountains, clay wadies, barren moors, thatched 
huts, flocks of sheep and goats, heather, pal- 
metto, olive and cistus. The rain washes them, 
the sun dries them — at last to mummies, it is 
true ; but this is the present. 

And is there not every week their journey to 
Paradise — the Socco di Barra — where they 
fight their way among the indescribable wares 



ACROSS THE CENTURIES 77 

that lie on narrow sidewalk and muddy street; 
where bread is the bush at every vender's door, 
the most abused staple of food in all their 
world? In the little paved streets, where a line 
of muddy water is always running to add need- 
less emphasis to the odors, fish is laid out on 
mats among which the tiny donkey hoofs pick 
their way; leopard-like fish with broad black 
spots ; fish half eel, half beast. Strings of 
bright red peppers and duller tomatoes and 
long rosaries of onions deck the way. 

Great bowls of yellow beans lean toward the 
passer; sausages swing before his face; bread 
is nailed up, dangled from strings, laid on the 
edge of the walk. Cakes and sweets tempt the 
flies always ready to take what is set before 
them. Great joints of meat hang among the 
loaves and fishes ; artichokes and the nameless 
green herbs that are served cannily at table 
make a green spot in the booths all along the 
way and vie with oranges and tangerines, 
lemons, pears and apples, even pumpkins that 
look ludicrously homesick, like country cousins 
at a city bazaar. 

Ho, for the pumpkin pie of old New Eng- 
land ! And oh, for the bread across seas ! 



78 

Bread made by washen hands and covered with 
linen clean and white. Bread sweet and tender 
and nourishing, a joy to the eyes and to the 
imagination. Not made in stony rings and 
hung in every doorway to be pushed aside like 
a portiere; laid on the street, strung on the 
shafts of carts, piled on burnous sleeves that 
never knew the taste of soap or smelled the 
sweetness of water. "He asked for bread and 
they gave him a stone." It need be no reproach 
to the giver here. 

Up and on we go, among donkeys and men 
and what are called women and children. With 
scarce room for a foot one balances on a stone 
above the mud and waits for the crowd to melt 
an inch as it grazes trays of fruit, boards of 
sticky sweets, lentils, artichokes and much- 
enduring bread. Here an old man is stirring 
a ragout over a brazier in an unwashed jar. 
Live fowls look out with unconcern from their 
owners' laps, or are lifted by the wings like but- 
terflies with cherubic effect, though they look 
more foolish than when swung head downward 
and bound by the heels with others, to be 
dragged through the masses, — plumage turned 



ACROSS THE CENTURIES 79 

upside down, till thej must look forward with 
interest to the last pang. 

Dirty, heavenly Tangier! One looks across 
seas with desire for its holes and caves, its 
tumult of donkeys and men that melt away like 
motes in the air, like fish in the sea, when you 
think them an impassable barrier. Now and 
then donkey bunts donkey or child, priest, Nu- 
bian or Soudanese ; but there is no friction. It 
is oil with oil, not oil with water, and they blend 
like primary colors. 

At the great court of justice where the judge 
sits in the gate, one looks for blows to follow the 
torrent of shouted words over an unwise trans- 
action. The accused has children and no bread 
and no money he swears again and again. And 
the judge — it may be the unjust judge — in his 
spotless white robe speaks, the offender pays 
his dues, and the peace that was disturbed re- 
turns again. 

At the harem a tall Nubian slave escorts you 
to the presence of the favorite who sits with her 
women rolling and patting small cakes. Her 
eyes are beautiful, but the tall, stately Nubian 
is much more impressive; most lightly clad, 
with bare feet and legs, and a great gold hoop 



80 

in one ear. Her shapely brown feet make no 
sound on the tiled floors where she goes and 
comes like a thinking shadow. An atmosphere 
of stagnant quiet fills the place. The outside 
air with its endless odor of donkey is easier to 
breathe. 

A holy man — a young man — passes, in blue 
silk burnous. "He is on his way to Mecca," the 
guide says. "Many go there." 

Steep and difficult as the pathway of the 
gods is the cobbled way to the lower town 
which we descend sidewise and crippled, cling- 
ing to each other, slipping and quailing before 
the next impossible step. 

Far out in the deep blue of the harbor lies 
the steamer from Cadiz, and bright-hued Moors 
are rowing seasick passengers out to it. The 
waves buffet and the boat stands on end, but 
falls over to the next ridge, bow up, then stern 
up ; and with shouts and waving arms the ship's 
side is reached at last and the perilous steps 
climbed. 

We fancy them sorry — these touring folk — 
to go back to modern times. When they are 
tossing across to Gibraltar they will remember 
the songs of Fez and Tetuan rising and falling 



ACROSS THE CENTURIES 81 

with the chords of strange instruments; the 
turbaned men wailing dolorous laments like 
funeral chants; the Moorish arches overhead 
in the dim, painted room ; the odor of strong 
coffee filling the close air ; the sprawling groups 
playing for drinks with cards, like nothing this 
side of the centuries. And if they have had one 
taste of the lotus in far Tangier it may be they 
will think backward with the sigh — "Lochaber 



no more I 



I" 



ON DONKEY-BACK TO CAPE SPARTEL 

1 HE morning of December twelfth broke 
slowly. Gray clouds hung over the Riffl Moun- 
tain-range to the east, and there were grave 
doubts as to the wisdom of attempting the all- 
day trip. But Douk Ali was already at the 
door with his men and their beasts, and the 
broad courtyard was overflowing with impor- 
tance. 

Douk Ali, tall, handsome, and serene, in blue 
burnous, golf stockings and tan shoes, moved 
here and there suggesting a tighter strap or a 
shifted saddle, and his Moors worked as pleased 
them. Who were they to ascribe value to a 
fragment of time which is all in Allah's hands .f* 

We were seven, with five men: Mohamed 
Tabgi; Abderkader; Hadj Mohd Millood; El 
Kraa ; Mohamed Gibeloo ; and Douk Ali, leader 
and guide. Awaiting our pleasure were two 
high, dark donkeys of uniform color, with 
English saddles ; one lesser beast patched like 
an old burnous; three like hair trunks in the 
fourth generation; and a low, gray creature 
with baby face and sleepy eyes under drooping 



ON DONKEY-BACK TO CAPE SPARTEL 83 

lids, who backed into his kind and thrust an 
innocent nose into their dark councils as they 
shifted and slid like iron filings under a magnet. 

It was the little gray that fell to my share 
and bumped against his fellows when I was 
mounted on the Spanish saddle whose footboard 
would swing anywhere but underfoot. Time 
went noiselessly on, and almost as noiselessly 
the little gray donkey vibrated like an ill-set 
pendulum in among his brother-donkeys and 
master-men, who shouldered and elbowed him 
out of their way. 

Thus far it was simple enough to one unused 
to any kind of saddle and who had doubted the 
possibility of staying on at all. The test would 
come when we dropped suddenly down the steep, 
cobbled gutter- way leading to the sands where 
we had watched the heads of riders disappear- 
ing day by day. But the gray donkey paced 
it soberly, and the first stage was safely past. 

Douk Ali headed the long procession, sitting 
in sidewise dignity like an Old Testament 
worthy, on a little creature that also carried 
the great panniers with our luncheon. As we 
ambled across the muddy streams from the 
great well where Arabs filled goatskin bottles 



84 maddalena's day 

or held them dripping on their dingy shoulders, 
children and chickens and pigs made way for 
us, as did the throng of Soudanese, Nubians, 
Moors and beggars on the steep road to the 
town. Here we were lost in the indescribable 
torrent that rises and swells, but seldom falls 
away from the roughly cobbled, mountainous 
streets. The gray donkey's nose fitted into any 
crevice, and where the crowd rose like the comb 
of a breaker his owner pushed him from behind. 

Two of our party rode bareheaded, hoping 
to find broad sun hats in the Socco di Barra. 
It was market day, and though everything else 
was on sale there were no hats. But the day 
was gray, the December air soft, and any head 
covering superfluous. 

In dark crevices and rifts of the city wall the 
young Faithful recited the Koran in singsong 
to an old, old man who had no need of the book. 

We traced our way up a long, narrow, beau- 
tifully shaded lane, soon came to our mountain 
road, and went up and up and up from bad to 
worse. Here and there a traveler passed us, 
but for the most part we had the country to 
ourselves. On the few level stretches the beasts 
were prodded and slapped, urged on by hand 



ON DONKEY-BACK TO CAPE SPARTEL 85 

and stick. Oh, the horror of the donkey's trot ! 
His amble is the very rocking-chair of mo- 
tion — a chair with short rockers ; but his trot 
is of the Inquisition. It not only jellies the 
brain but loosens the very bones from their 
sockets as the feet rattle like castanets on the 
dangling stirrup-board. 

As we climbed height after height only to 
reach a still higher, Tangier faded slowly in the 
gray air that shut off so much we wished to see. 
Heather and cacti grew all along our way, with 
low, shrubby eucalyptus in demand for fire- 
wood. Presently we came across two old women 
and a boy cutting the stalks and binding them 
into immense back loads for the market. The 
women were like moving mummies burned to a 
faded black, wrinkled and wizened, with coars- 
est garments reaching to the knees and open at 
the throat, and rough sacking tied with rope 
around their legs. All were barefooted. They 
looked at us with indifference; but two small 
girls running down from a hut high up on our 
right stopped suddenly and flattered us with 
their keen interest. 

The moorland spread all about us with its 
yellows, browns and reds, its great prickly 



86 maddalena's day 

pears like hideous beggars, and stunted olives 

twisted by the wind; but the white city behind 

us and the sight of miles of outlying country 

were cut off by the insistent grayness of the 

day. 

Just above the group of fagot bearers the 
real weariness of the trip began. Boulders lay 
ahead with masses of broken stone, and the poor 
donkeys picked their way where donkeys before 
them had left long marks of sliding hoofs. 
When a foot of level was reached it meant no 
rest, simply pushing on to the next steep, each 
worse than the last. The men ran alongside, 
one hand on the saddle and arrhaed and 
prodded; and still up we went with no pros- 
pect of reaching the top. Tops came in view, 
each higher and steeper than the one just 
passed, but no real top appeared. 

But all things have an ultimate end, even the 
mountain pass to Cape Spartel — that innocent 
cape like a pinprick on the map of Africa 
toward the setting sun — and after two hours 
we saw a bit of yellow sand miles away, and the 
sea below rallying around it. Great trees be- 
neath our path were like a carpeting of moss; 
and for the first time we caught a glimpse of 



ON DONKEY-BACK TO CAPE SPARTEL 87 

the white lighthouse, lonely sentinel above a 
lonelier sea. 

As we dropped slowly down to the solid road- 
way with its massive retaining wall we came 
suddenly upon two women with mattocks widen- 
ing the road on the mountain side at the left. 
Most scantily clad and bare-legged, they looked 
stolidly indifferent to our cavalcade as it pat- 
tered by. A look of compassion lighted Douk 
Ali's handsome, impenetrable face, as he said, 
"Spanish ladies work awful hard." 

Out of the loneliness and silence towered the 
lighthouse, imposing in height and strength. 
Within its broad courtyard a fountain dripped, 
but its clear water had a brassy taste. Two of 
the unappeased sight-seers mounted the stairs 
after registering in the office where many na- 
tions had registered before; but they soon re- 
turned. There was nothing to be seen but a 
great stretch of our own gray ocean, a sun- 
burnt house of two or three rooms, a stable, and 
the green heights we were too familiar with. 

The wife of the keeper greeted us with 
courtesy ; her husband rolled out a round table 
along the echoing court. This our men spread 
with clean linen and the contents of the pan- 



88 

niers — partridge, ham, boiled eggs, rolls, fresh 
butter, cheese, olives, raisins, oranges, the 
luscious dates of Tangier, and Valdepeiias 
wine; and the Spanish woman within sent out 
hot thick Turkish coffee. So we lunched with 
great content under the lee of the lighthouse on 
the twelfth day of December, while two hungry- 
eyed dogs watched us greedily, snatched the 
partridge bones and bread we tried to appease 
them with and were always at attention for 
more. 

The luncheon of the men which followed ours 
was a brief function. There was a quick pack- 
ing of the panniers and grouping of the 
donkeys whose rest had been shortened by a 
few drops of threatening rain. It was impos- 
sible to forget the awful miles before us. We 
had stipulated that our way back should skirt 
the mountain, a longer road but easier. Here 
the men rebelled and the eldest of them mounted 
his charge on the gray donkey and ran it off in 
the direction he chose to take. 

Douk Ali, the Faithful, was between two fires. 
We were his guests ; his life for ours. He must 
keep his word with us, but the men were five to 
one, and their speech was not of the Koran. 



ON DONKEY-BACK TO CAPE SPARTEL 89 

The gray donkey was ordered back, and his 
owner, with clenched fist shaken toward the new 
way, shouted, "No good, no good !" We held 
a council with our guide who confessed that 
though the way was bad as possible for the first 
mile, infinitely worse than the other, it was 
much better for the rest of the way. "No 
good" still rumbled and echoed on the quiet air, 
and we could not gainsay it. So we left the 
beasts to pick their way among rocks that 
Deucalion might have flung behind him — rocks 
that would have peopled his world with mon- 
sters. With a reliable guide's hold on one arm 
and the aid of his quick eye to see and choose 
possible footholds, we went on inch by inch, 
reach by reach, while the free donkeys dropped 
down with the lightness of wings. 

At last, at last, we were on the yellow sands 
with a green tide foaming in and many flooded 
inlets to cross — inlets that we shuddered at as 
well as the donkeys, and would have been as 
glad to run from. The men whisked off their 
sandals, holding them in the hand that grasped 
the saddle, and every donkey was persuaded 
according to his nature to go down into un- 
known deeps. He "had to be reconciled." 



90 

A scramble up again, another reach of sand, 
a view of long lines of splendid breakers, 
another inlet. Sometimes the helpless beasts 
resisted, to their hurt, but the floods did not 
drown them, and in time — oh, such time! — we 
came to the desired Caves of Hercules. A 
lonely life it must have been if he wintered in 
these sand-bitten, surf-beaten caves, high and 
hoary, ranged by twos and threes, with often a 
strip of fine white sand spread before the en- 
trance. One little summer cave high above the 
rest had a green strip of lawn before its door; 
and wide avenues of bleached sand separated 
others, winding upward like pathways of the 
greater gods. Here but for the sea was the 
silence of the desert — the grim silence of centu- 
ries that fuses nations and makes all humanity 
of all ages kindred. 

Again we mounted, struggling through path- 
less sand hills, gaining one steep after another, 
with the roaring ocean behind hurrying us on, 
until at last table-land was reached. Here 
grew the tall Mediterranean heather, the cactus 
and eucalyptus through which the men ran and 
leapt, their sandals full of wet sand flapping 



ON DONKEY-BACK TO CAPE SPARTEL 91 

at every step but never falling off. And still 
the poor beasts were slapped and prodded on. 

Gorges with crumbling edges appeared, and 
the brown legs leaned in and sturdy arms and 
shoulders pushed the donkeys on, and the sand 
and stones rattled down as they passed. 

Then came the wadies — horrible creeks with 
sticky bottoms or muddy runlets through 
which the donkeys had to be persuaded by 
means indescribable. Sometimes they utterly 
refused, as would we if we could, and ran back, 
even with certainty of a day of reckoning at 
hand. 

It was then that the gray donkey with the 
guileless face began to sit down. I say "began" 
advisedly; for in spite of cursings and whacks 
like the splitting of timber, he would double his 
little legs and tiny hoofs under him and brood 
like a marble lamb on a tombstone, while his 
rider, snatched off by the maddened guide, 
begged for his life. It was his custom, Douk 
Ali said, after a conference with his master. 
He was not tired. And as a custom it was 
much honored in the observance. His rider 
soon learned the signs of rebellion, and at the 



92 

helpless, extorted cry, "Oh, he's wagging his 
head!" Mohamed smote him hip and thigh, 
and with awful blows on the nearest cheek, as 
if he had been an ox for sacrifice; and tem- 
porarily the gray beast changed his mind. 
But if Mohamed, who had a great flow of 
language, happened to be shouting to a com- 
rade behind, down went little gray with human 
persistence and cherubim placidity. His soft 
brown eyes half veiled by their drooping lids 
expressed undaunted trust in his religion. If 
he must perish it was the will of Allah. Mean- 
while he would rest and shake off the infidel 
weight that bruised both flesh and spirit. 

The sun began to withdraw behind the moun- 
tains and a grayer light filled all the valleys 
and gorges. High up among the oaks and 
olives thatched huts rested in peaceful security 
and toward these the flocks went slowly, snatch- 
ing at tufts of scanty grass as they passed to 
the fold. 

"Two miles," was the response to our con- 
stant questions, changed after a time to "four 
miles," which served for another hour. And 
still no white-walled Tangier; nothing but 



ON DONKEY-BACK TO CAPE SPARTEL 93 

these gloomy mountains, this desolate plain, 
and hill upon hill beyond. Up and down 
through more wadies deep to descend, out to 
some acres of moorland with all the color faded 
out, and still the same two miles to cover. 

Then darkness came, the swift darkness that 
the eye in time adjusts itself to, and out of the 
darkness a gleam here and there, then blessed 
Tangier. 

But before we clattered over its stones, long 
before, our guides left us almost alone, to pull 
oif their turbans and fezzes and bow toward the 
west where the sun should have given us one line 
of glory. The impatient beasts, with no kin- 
dred religious emotion, backed and stamped and 
pressed one against another, until to our relief 
their masters appeared and started the line of 
march. 

Up a height to the great Socco di Barra we 
paced soberly under dense trees, high above the 
roadway; and the living lights below were a joy 
to the eyes. And so at last we came home, 
ambling down the awful, cobbled ways where no 
donkey stumbled or slipped, and climbed in 
safety to the wide courtyard — just in time for 
seven o'clock dinner — the Bay of Tangier with 



94 maddalena's day 

its full tide before our very door, the Riffl 
Mountain at our right breaking out into stars 
among its oaks and olives. 



OUT OF THE PAST 



THE ABBEY'S LEGEND 

A S long ago as when three figures told the 
century, a little company of devout monks 
found an unoccupied knoll in a swamp where 
the river Thames makes a great southward 
sweep, and there built a monastery with Peter 
for patron saint. 

Years afterwards, Edward the Confessor 
founded glorious Westminster Abbey on this 
very spot, where at the time of our story no one 
had so much as dreamed of the future fame of 
the lonely little chapel, which, like a rough, 
brown seed, held within itself the possibility of 
exceeding greatness. 

There was a clear spring near by where the 
monks might fill their abstemious cups, or dip 
the hard bread which they begged day by day 
in London town. What an outing it must have 
been, breaking the monotony of uneventful days 
that bore their generation on as quietly as the 
river before them floated its driftwood to the 
sea! 

Meantime, while the chapel was in the green- 



98 

ness of its youth, the hour drew near for its 
dedication, and one can fancy the ripple of 
anticipation that stirred within the patient 
breasts of men who told their beads and kept 
long fasts and weary vigils without hope of 
earthly recompense. 

One dark night, the Sunday before the day 
appointed for the chapel's dedication, a poor 
fisherman, Edric by name, rowed slowly up and 
down the Thames. All day long he had worked 
faithfully, but, in the very places where fish 
were to be had almost for the asking, this day 
he had caught none. At last he laid down the 
oars in despair, and, with uncomplimentary 
thoughts of the saints whose business it was to 
look after his interests, sat with his chin sunken 
on his breast and his hard hands clasped 
around his cold knees, when suddenly, out of 
the very middle of the silence around him, he 
heard, or thought he heard, a voice calling his 
name. 

It was not the sharp voice of his wife, which 
had more than once broken in upon his reveries 
by heralding his ill luck, but an unknown, mel- 
low sound that by keen contrast made little 
shivers chase down his aching spine. 



99 

As he looked about him warily, a light from 
the shore flashed on the water and trembled like 
a reflected star at the boat's head. Edric 
hastily caught up his oars, and, pulling in the 
direction of the voice, saw an old man on the 
bank, who beckoned him with one hand, and as 
he drew near begged to be rowed across the 
river. 

Now, whether Edric chanced to be a soft- 
hearted fellow in those hard old days, or 
whether conscience pricked because he had gone 
a-fishing on the Sabbath-day, I cannot tell. 
But be that as it may, he quickly made ready 
for his passenger without first claiming a fee, 
and when the stranger was seated turned his 
boat across the stream towards the monastery. 

Once or twice Edric cleared his throat cheer- 
fully to address the venerable figure which sat 
silently, with crossed arms, facing him; but 
after all he had nothing to say, especially with- 
out encouragement, so they went on without a 
word. 

A heavy, black robe lay in long lines over the 
knees of Edric's companion, except for one fold 
that was thrown backward over the head, con- 
cealing the hair and most of the forehead. The 



100 maddalena's day 

face was chiefly in shadow, but now and then, 
as Edric glanced towards it, a light like that of 
two near stars shone on him from beneath the 
heavy brows, and made him uncomfortable, and 
awkward with the oars. 

Once across, the stranger leaped out like 
a lad, and, without so much as a thank- 
you, though his looks were courteous, walked 
straight to the chapel, which on the instant 
blazed at every window with a soft, warm light 
like that of a thousand candles — a cheery sight 
to a fisherman who was not only hungry, but 
wet and shivering as well. 

Edric was a bold man, and not one whit 
afraid of a miracle, which was a thing not to be 
carped at; so he moored his boat and drew 
nearer. And lo ! like the swift patter of a sum- 
mer shower on fluttering leaves, a soft, swishing 
sound fell all around his ears, and a billowing 
host of angels alighted within an arrow's length 
of where he stood. It was as if they "brake 
through the sky"; or, rather, as if the earthly 
atmosphere grew thin, and revealed them on the 
outskirts of the heavenly place where it touched 
the earthly. Then they glided into the 
chapel — ^but whether with wings or without, 



THE abbey's legend 101 

Edric could never remember — the stranger 
leading the host, and there, with litanies and 
genuflexions, the celestial convoy dedicated it 
to the service of the Highest. 

Edric had heard the monks singing both at 
matins and at vespers as he threw his lines and 
pulled in his fish day by day ; but never had he 
listened to such Te Deums and Glorias as these 
that shook the monastery like a mighty wind. 
He was creeping cautiously to the threshold of 
the door, throbbing with curiosity, and wonder- 
ing if it were lawful to enter, or even to look 
upon the altar, when there came a rustle, a 
sweep of vast wings, and sudden darkness, and 
out of the darkness the voice of the stranger: 

"Give me to eat, Edric," it said. 

But Edric replied, cap in hand, "I have 
toiled all night and taken nothing." 

"Where learnedst thou those words V^ the old 
man asked; and as Edric's pupils expanded in 
the starlight, which was the only light, now that 
the chapel stood a black heap against the sky, 
he saw that the stranger smiled; and a sudden 
flash of thought made the fisherman catch his 
breath. 

"Be not afraid," the stranger said benignly. 



102 maddalena's day 

"I am Peter, and I feed my Lord's sheep as He 
commanded me. Thou rememberest the words 
in Holy Writ? And I hold the keys of Heaven 
— they are even now in the pocket of my robe — 
and open to whom I will. I must be gone, for 
a great multitude is even now waiting at the 
gate. Be not afraid, but hearken." 

"I fear naught," said the fisherman; "that 
is, naught but the devil"; but his teeth chat- 
tered as he crossed himself. 

"Go then to the Bishop," commanded Peter, 
"and tell him what thou hast seen and heard 
this night. And hereafter thou shalt find good 
fishing, save only on a Sunday. Promise me 
thou wilt not drop line on the holy day, and 
that thou wilt give food to my poor." 

Edric promised quickly, for indeed he could 
not well do less, knowing that he was keeping 
souls out of Heaven ; and as the saint vanished, 
with much jingling of keys, he made clumsy 
haste to put the river between himself and the 
chapel. 

Next day, when the Bishop arrived with 
mitre and crozier and a great retinue, the 
fisherman met him on the farther river bank 
with a noble salmon in his hand, the gift of 



103 

Peter, and told him in many words the tale of 
the night just past. 

And so it befell that the chapel had no 
further consecration, for even the Bishop was 
not sure that he could surpass St. Peter and 
his angels. 



THE PRIEST'S DILEMMA 

I T was fast growing dark in the vast cathedral, 
and the Father who was old and weary leaned 
his heavy head on both hands, and in the deep 
shadows of the confessional quite lost his 
thoughts. 

Suddenly a curious, creepy sound startled 
him; and looking up, dazed and penitent for 
his fault, he thought one of the high angels 
above the choir had dropped his trumpet and 
come to him for help. Half-dreaming still, he 
murmured, "Go to Saint Anthony — Anthony 
of Padua, you know." But the thought passed 
quickly, and he brushed it aside as if it had 
been one of the cobwebs that often swept across 
his face and hands in the holy place. 

Right before him stood the most beautiful 
creature his old eyes had ever looked upon, tall 
and strong and broad-shouldered and fair, with 
eyes the color of spring violets and a gleam of 
gold in the heart of them like smouldering fire. 

"What wilt thou, son?" he asked, crossing 
himself; for he feared with a deadly fear this 
young angel of light who stood unabashed in 



105 

his presence, — so bold and strong indeed that 
the good Father crossed himself again as he 
thought and was afraid, and thought again, of 
the angels who lost their first estate. 

Then the youth spoke, and the priest trem- 
bled with a deadly fear from the top of his 
tonsure to the soles of his outworn sandals. 
For a kind of crazed lightning ran quivering 
before his eyes, and he thought death was near, 
and reached out to lay hold on something to 
steady and sustain him in his place. And the 
darting light, now dim, now glowing, passed be- 
fore him like the flower light of the Aurora, 
which opens like a blossom and quivers and 
closes and quivers again, making the dark 
luminous. So, clutching his stool with one 
hand, he made the sign of the cross above his 
eyes and was glad that the vision had gone to- 
gether with the dim lightnings and fearful 
quakings that stopped his breath and made his 
heart stand still in his throat. 

But even as he prayed in thankfulness it 
came again, and torrents of prismatic color 
flooded the cathedral and rolled in great billows 
above the choir, but left the cross in velvet 
blackness. "What wilt thou, my son.?"' the 



106 

good priest asked again, but more feebly this 
time; and the youth answered in a wonderful 
voice, "Absolve me from my weight of sin, for 
its burden is too great for me — even for me." 

Then into the shocked ears of the priest the 
bold, beautiful creature poured such a tale of 
horrors that the good man shook with terror. 

"Nay, my son !" he chattered at length, when 
his breath came to him again. And in the 
silence that was dreadful with sound he reached 
for his crucifix. 

"Kiss this holy symbol in penitence," he said, 
"and if thou hast seven devils the Christ is able 
to cast them out." 

But even as he spoke the air trembled and the 
vast cathedral seemed moved out of its place, 
and with the sound of dreadful thunder the 
youth glided away, seeming to creep and 
shrink as he passed the high altar. And the 
Father, half-dazed and wholly stricken by the 
sight, saw that this his guest had great wings 
of purple that flashed with many-colored light, 
broken at the tips with here and there the web 
torn apart, which still sternly and masterfully 
beat the air like an imprisoned bird mad for 
freedom. 



THE priest's dilemma 107 

And the poor priest, for all his holy living, 
his fasting and scourging, never knew to his 
dying hour whether he was blest or curst be- 
cause he had failed to shrive a Prince of 
Darkness. 



THE INIQUITY OF MIDAS 

King MIDAS, after his notable encounter 
with Apollo, wearied of the reed country with its 
telltale whisperings, and set out alone for the 
town. 

All along the way spring daffodils blossomed, 
and anemones with scarlet poppies brightened 
the fields of corn and meadows where the cattle 
fed. 

Midas yearned to gather armfuls of their 
splendor, but knew well that the burden of them 
once touched would weigh him to earth. So he 
clasped his hands tight and sang as he went: 

O Great Apollo! 
Take back thy gift 
Or let me share it 
Amid a host. 

As he went singing thus through the byways 
to the town young children met him crowned 
with garlands of poppies, bearing shredded cac- 
tus leaves for their goats; but he could not 
trust himself to kiss their innocence or bless 



THE INIQUITY OF MIDAS 109 

them with his hands, lest he turn them to price- 
less images of gold. And as he went sadly and 
dumbly on the song died on his lips and became 
a curse in his heart. For all men taunted him 
and laid their hands to their ears, waving them 
back and forth in derision. And as he was king 
of an alien country only they had no fear of 
him. Also they well knew that an unfortunate 
creature cannot be heard by strange gods when 
he calls upon them for redress. 

Presently there passed by an old man and 
forlorn, bent and gray, and most pitifully clad ; 
and Midas seeing this beckoned him aside into 
the shadow of a high wall and offered him plen- 
tiful store of gold in exchange for his ears. 

Age is sordid indeed when its ideals are dead. 
But the old man's ears were of little use to him, 
being dulled by years, and he hurried away 
drawing scant locks over those newly acquired, 
though they would not be covered — ears that 
turned this way and that, harking for disaster 
on every side. But his hands were full of gold, 
and as he crept stiffly along the road where he 
had danced in his childhood the mob looked on 
with wonder and desire, running from far and 
near to see the strange sight. 



no 

"All this for asses' ears !" the old man cried, 
showing his gold; and the multitude ran and 
shouted, and some fell down at his feet crying, 
"A boon! A boon!" 

"Wilt thou have these ears with the gold?" 
he cried; and they knelt in the dust and wor- 
shiped him. 

One man only of the throng stood aloof with 
scorn in his eyes: 

"All that gold can buy, thou sayest?" 

"Yea." 

"House and lands, food and wine, slaves and 
followers, praise and paeans?" 

"Yea." 

"Friends and home, wife and children, faith 
and love, free will and a noble heart?" 

The old man stood silent, lines of pain mar- 
ring his face above its wrinkles. 

"Fare thee well!" cried the other. "Peddle 
thy gold elsewhere." 

But the man of priceless treasure had few re- 
buffs; and soon having slaves to serve him 
tasted rare food and rarer wine, though his 
couch was hard as iron, and his old bones 
creaked and chilled at night. 

And even the vision of countless gold ceased 



THE INIQUITY OF MIDAS 111 

to cheer him when he heard with quickened ears 
the wail that went up to Heaven from a 
stricken city where there was neither love nor 
hope, faith nor charity, and the fairest youths 
and maidens were but hollow golden shells. 

So King Midas scattered lavishly in royal 
fashion his woes with their evil labels that 
promised gifts ; and a great city died. Only a 
single soul survived; and that was kept in a 
sheath of youth that held its own ideals high 
above the power and shame and misery of gold. 

As for the Innocents they went dancing on, 
and are playing still in fields of sunshine where 
their goats browse happily or rest on beds of 
red poppies and fragrant asphodel, where the 
bees buzz all day long and only the shepherd's 
pipe and the pleasant bells of the herd break 
the stillness of the summer air. 



A BRIEF FOR MISTRESS SOCRATES 

W HO can tell us anything of the wife of 
Socrates? Persistent through the long, slow 
ages, one bitter drop has trickled down to blot 
the name: "Xanthippe, wife of Socrates, 
reputed to be a scold." Somewhat grudgingly 
it is suggested that she was a good housewife. 

It is a cruel thing to be hounded down the 
unresisting centuries, to be pilloried from gen- 
eration to generation, even to the end of time, 
as the shrewish wife of a serene philosopher. 
But are not all serene philosophers "gey ill to 
live wi' ".? Effects do not come without causes 
in any save a chance world. 

We like to fancy that Xanthippe was once 
upon a time a young Greek girl with all that 
the name implies. We suspect that she had 
grace if not beauty, and certainly some measure 
of wisdom since she chose a man of repute in- 
stead of a flute-playing shepherd, or other 
philandering boy. We fancy her in slim tunic, 
with delicate sandaled feet, a fillet binding her 
soft hair, or a chaplet of bitter-sweet aspho- 
del — a little, bright Persephone knee-deep in 



A BRIEF FOR MISTRESS SOCRATES 113 

bee-haunted fields of flowers, a dancing creature 
haloed with all the light of life, among her 
shepherd playmates; leading shaggy goats by 
their beards ; wreathing their crooked horns 
with scarlet poppies; playing it was the great 
god Pan she had found and captured; offering 
gifts of cactus leaves shorn of their sharp 
prickles ; chasing the homing wild bee to dis- 
cover its honey hoard gathered from Hybla or 
Hymettus or the asphodel fields at the foot of 
the Acropolis, where the shepherd boys lay 
through the long sunny noons and watched 
their flocks or sang rough ditties to Xan- 
thippe's hair or eyes or flying feet. 

How the philosopher won this bright being of 
air and sunshine we may not know. We are 
told that Socrates, like Marsyas the Satyr, had 
thick lips, staring eyes and a misshapen body. 
Are not women in all ages of the world burning 
perpetual incense at the shrine of some pre- 
posterous idol? 

Do not doubt that Xanthippe had some 
present-day problems to solve. Socrates had 
the faculty of indigence. Poor Xanthippe! 
Children came to their meager home, and when 
she begged for bread her philosopher, their 



114 maddalena's day 

father, gave her — a syllogism. However well 
syllogisms may nourish mature minds they are 
but a thin and juiceless diet for the youth 
whose legs are growing faster than his brain. 
Xanthippe might have answered on the spur of 
the moment some of the high questions that we 
admire to-day: — What is Piety.? What the 
Just and the Unjust? 

As time dimmed the glamour which may have 
obscured the early vision Xanthippe must have 
discovered that the man she honored for his 
wisdom was far from the standard domestic 
type. He was not a man diligent in business, 
who, according to Solomon, shall stand before 
kings. She was no weak, silly Griselda, praised 
of men, to sacrifice life silently to a vagrant 
philosopher who cared neither to work nor to 
eat. All Xanthippe's hammering could not 
make gold-leaf out of this cushiony gnome. 
Who could teach the sons of this thriftless 
father, this breadwinner who had to be hounded 
to his workshop, who never made a statue until 
driven by desperate want, preferring to be like 
the gods who want nothing .^^ But the gods had 
no acknowledged families to support. 

Thus he went about the streets with young 



A BRIEF FOR MISTRESS SOCRATES 115 

men who encouraged him to waste his time in 
talk which, so far as Xanthippe could see, 
brought no revenue to the household. This 
woman stood too near the ragged philosopher 
to observe his greatness. In days like these of 
the twentieth century Xanthippe might have 
voiced her wrongs from the platform, or de- 
manded her rights by stone-throwing and 
parades. But so far as we can learn she simply 
scolded. 

What could she have called him we wonder. 
History is disdainfully mute; though we can 
think of perfectly legitimate epithets. Yet it 
has passed into an adage that hard words break 
no bones. There is no evidence of battering. 

But Socrates did not set up for a man of 
spirit: he only wanted to know the Why of 
things. — So, doubtless, did Xanthippe. 

People not profane in their own right may 
yet be the cause of profanity in others. With 
a great mind on great themes Socrates may 
have scattered olive stones and rare bread — 
even spilled wine that left stains — all along 
Xanthippe's tidy atrium. For Pericles and 
Aspasia, with slaves to come at handclapping, 
all this riot of untidiness would not have turned 



116 maddalena's day 

a feather. Aspasia could have smiled and made 
wise speeches, and Pericles would have walked 
blind. But Socrates' boys may have walked 
blind also, taking after their father as boys 
have been known to do, and leaving their mother 
to be the slave-at-call in her own person. 

To the young Greek who knew no philosophy 
Socrates must have been a figure for derision 
and scoffing, an instigator of epithets. He 
could not be perturbed by trifles, but the youth 
he daily led may have possessed fiery spirits 
and retaliated on poor Xanthippe, scandalized 
that she did not keep their master in better 
condition. A careful wife would have patched 
his one old toga. But he never left it off save 
to shed it when it would no longer cover him. 
Doubtless the offended wife clutched at her 
husband in praiseworthy exasperation as he 
serenely set sail for the agora, and with well- 
merited, bitter words held him in her firm grasp 
till she could draw together into decency as 
few of the rags as he would stand still for. 

Hampered men protest under such condi- 
tions in forcible words. Socrates had only 
mild, philosophic ones; but Xanthippe's pro- 
fanity comes down to us by implication only 



A BRIEF FOR MISTRESS SOCRATES 117 

and our general knowledge of human nature. 
To have the man of her choice, the father of her 
sons, a laughing-stock in great Athens, an ob- 
ject of mirth which she was helpless to pre- 
vent — ^poor Xanthippe! 

His very good nature — how maddening! A 
most improper, improbable-looking man! As 
if nature had planned a satyr and suddenly in 
the midst of her work set her mind upon a god. 
What could a beauty-loving Greek woman do, 
bitterly ashamed of her poverty-stricken, rag- 
ged, happy, barefoot consort, a crowd of men 
and boys at his heels, as if he wore cap and 
bells, discoursing like many another fool in 
words of wisdom that made him still more con- 
spicuous, to her endless shame ! 

And after all is said, but one charge is made 
against Mistress Socrates. Did she bar the 
door to restrain him from making an object of 
himself in the polite streets of Athens? Did 
she attack him with unseemly violence or loud 
reproaches in the marketplace? Did she tell 
his followers in burning words that their popu- 
lar idol neither fed nor taught nor clothed those 
of his own household? If so there is no evi- 
dence in proof. 



118 

While she still had the spirit of a woman was 
it not her privilege to give him her opinion as 
to the kind of man he was outside his philos- 
ophy, even with keen, weapon-like words? 

And when at last, as the hemlock began its 
deadly work, was it nothing to her that he 
ordered all women out of his presence? 

After all, is it not better to be written A 
Scold on Time's persistent tablets than to be 
lost in oblivion? "Better," says the wise man 
speaking in a proverb, "is a living dog than a 
dead lion." 

And now that Mistress Socrates' long ache of 
life is over, and she has summered in Elysian 
fields this score and more of centuries, may she 
not indulge in a mild, paradisiacal thrill to 
know that her name will last as long as the 
pyramids ? — That it will wing its way down the 
dim aisles of Time side by side with Socrates' 
own, when the disgraceful old toga along with 
the masque of the body is indistinguishable 
dust? — That she, in her proper celestial guise, 
no longer querulous about ways and means, 
may meet with unclouded brow the heroes of 
forgotten ages, the women of the Caesars, and 
as many of the proud queens of this old planet 



A BRIEF FOR MISTRESS SOCRATES 119 

as have the privilege; and no longer blush for 
the now clothed-upon man who was a perpetual 
reproach to her in a former state — the one 
great cause of her sinning with her tongue? 
Triumphant Xanthippe! 



COPHETUA AND THE BEGGAR-MAID 

Once upon a time, in the olden, golden days 
of our dreams, lived rare King Cophetua. But 
his young majesty was no dream; neither was 
he an African prince, as has more than once 
been intimated in chronicle and legend, and this 
chiefly because he wooed and won a beggar- 
maid. 

It might have been in the lovely days of 
Pan — who, indeed, lives and walks the good 
old earth now, though unseen save by an elect 
few; but in some far-off delightful age he had 
his being, blue-eyed, yellow-haired lad, as fine 
and slim, as charming and pretty, as most 
princes in those golden days. He was very 
young, too ; much younger than I dare set down 
in the cold figures of mathematical lore, when 
the dull old king and queen died and left him 
heir to the ancient crown, with the freedom of 
his life to boot. 

Day by day, as he sat still for the space of 
a minute or two, happy and smiling at his own 



COPHETUA AND THE BEGGAR-MAID 121 

thoughts, on the hard throne, his people bowed 
down before him and sang his praises and 
begged him to choose a gracious queen from the 
willing princesses of other realms, till he broke 
away and ran off to play with his hounds. 

"Let well enough alone," quoth he, letting 
fall crown and robes, and leaping over the royal 
footstool in an amazing way. And let well 
enough alone he did in his kingly manner, 
despite the prayers of prostrate courtiers who 
encumbered his progress. Since he was mon- 
arch by the grace of God and the death of his 
ancestors, king he would be, and his own way 
he would have. 

So, as this became more and more apparent, 
even his chamberlain, his master of horse, his 
polisher of crown jewels, his keeper of the seal, 
together with a horde of knights and barons 
and esquires, did not nag him as they might 
under other conditions, but took things easy, 
as they came, and his cook and bottlewasher 
and such other inconsequent folk as held sway 
in the royal kitchens carried off odds and ends 
and half-bottles — and often by sheer accident 
whole ones — at a rate that would have made 
the old king and queen tear their hair. Some- 



122 

times, indeed, they killed a pet pig, which their 
sovereign innocently ate unbeknowing for his 
breakfast, the larder being quite bare of things 
to hash up or warm over on account of this 
careless habit of the under household. Indeed 
it was high time for a proper queen to rule both 
king and palace, only young Cophetua had 
never considered it. 

One fine morning, just fit for out of doors, 
when his lords were squabbling within over some 
trifling matter of law or court etiquet, making 
things not only loud but disagreeable, the king 
picked up his crown and his cloth-of-gold 
mantle and took his scepter from the corner, 
but considered and set it up again, then pulled 
on his riding boots with their gold spurs, all by 
himself, which was no small matter — as he had 
no knowledge of right and left — and picked 
his way softly to the stables, creeping along 
by the wrong side of the hedges. All the way he 
went stumbling and chuckling to himself over 
his narrow escape, and at length found and 
saddled his own glossy black Lucifer, jingling 
with ecstasy the jeweled rein as he mounted, 
with no one to so much as kneel in his way and 
hold his stirrups. And the amazed creature. 



COPHETUA AND THE BEGGAR-MAID 123 

who turned one fiery, backward eye on his 
master, forgot to rear and plunge with no 
baseborn groom at hand to kick. 

So the king found it a simple matter to 
mount, and rode away in no special direction, 
unobserved, clasping in pure joy the hands that 
held easy reins, and bubbling with fun when he 
thought what a to-do there would be in the 
palace after the rumpus was over and the lords 
temporal began to rub their eyes and look 
for the lost king, to kick each others' shins for 
carelessly letting him escape, and to scold the 
maids for not attending to the bloodshed and 
broken-up rushes before his majesty was found. 

All of which they might have taken their time 
about, had they known. 

For there he rode, sonsie, pretty young 
Cophetua, miles and miles away, over hills and 
through swamps, to say nothing of brooks and 
rivers, that made his boots and mantle heavy, 
till he came at last to a lonesome hut with a 
pig in the door and many children tumbling 
and shouting in the dark within. For there 
were no windows, and the door was just the 
width of the pig as he stood broadside, divided 
in his mind between the game going on inside 



124, 

and the chance of some scraps of food else- 
where. 

Cophetua drew rein and laughed long and 
loud, for there wasn't so much as a court fool 
to hear, and tossed over the pig's back a hand- 
ful of gold pieces that were by chance in his 
doublet pocket, and rode on. But not far. 

For there, wading in a pretty puddle at the 
edge of a wood, was the sweetest maid he ever 
laid eyes on. She was no more akin to the 
numberless princesses he had seen, with their 
Griselda smiles and bashful miens, than she was 
to the pig that raced out at the door and 
chased, grunting and squealing hungrily, after 
him, with all the children — no end of them. 

Indeed, to think again, the pig might have 
laid claim to her sooner than the king's 
daughters. Her long black hair waving and 
curly at the glistening ends rippled all over her 
in mad abundance. And well, O king! that it 
did! For beside it she had nothing belonging 
to her — positively nothing but a few uncon- 
sidered rags and tags and streamers of past 
clothing to keep out sun and rain, let alone the 
wind and folks' prejudices. 

Now the figure that stood dripping from 



COPHETUA AND THE BEGGAR-MAID 125 

head to foot in the puddle and not so much as 
blinking at sight of a crowned king, seemed to 
the lad so lovely, so splendid in color with the 
splendor of pomegranate blossoms, that as he 
knew now what he wanted quite as well as what 
he didn't want, he just leaned down and picking 
it up with one hand set it on his saddle bow 
with a sigh of perfect content; never having 
had his own mantle to scour, nor his horse's 
gear withal. 

"By the splendor of the sun I will marry 
you !" cried Cophetua, kissing a hundred times 
the sweet unwashen mouth that smiled up at 
him unafraid— and he with his glittering 

crown on ! 

"What is marry?" laughed the other. 

And "I will tell you as we ride," whispered 

the king; for a certain awe came over him at 
sight of her childlikeness ; and clinking the 
jeweled rein he shooed the little tribe that clung 
around Lucifer, not in the very least afraid of 
his heels, having never in all their lives seen so 
much as a donkey, nor anything nearer its 
shape than the pig that was grunting and nos- 
ing their bare toes. And Lucifer of the fiery 
eye and nimble heels stood meek as a lamb to 



126 

be patted and danced around, trying to puzzle 
out in his wise brain what these goings-on 
might mean. But all the king's shooing was 
to no purpose; for the little barbarians under- 
stood it as little as they did court etiquet. 

So Cophetua rummaged his pockets and 
found more gold, and standing in his stirrups 
with the dripping maid held close, flung it back 
as far as ever he could. And being a strong 
and determined monarch it flew far and wide. 

The children scattered with shouts and the 
pig galloped after, for he was a thin creature 
and unpampered. Then his royal master put 
golden spurs urgently to Lucifer and away 
they sped, the maiden's beautiful hair stream- 
ing across the lad's enamored eyes and blinding 
their blueness to the fact that a puddle was the 
only bath his divine bride-to-be ever had. 

Presently he drew sudden rein at a high 
hedge, and caught a ragged priest hiding with 
a rabbit under his cloak. 

"Come hither and marry me!" commanded 
the king; and the priest, hastily crossing him- 
self, tied the rabbit's legs together with a handy 
twig and tossed it into the bushes away from 
temptation. 



COPHETUA AND THE BEGGAR-MAID 127 

"What is your name?" queried the holy man 
bowing to the very earth and rubbing his 
muddy hands along the sides of his gown that 
was well used to it. 

"Sure I have none at all," quoth the pome- 
granate maid, shaking back her veil of shadowy 
hair and looking him straight in the eye. 

"But they must call you something, my 
dear," quavered his reverence, looking up and 
down and everywhere but at the king; wishing 
himself hampered and out of sight in the hedge- 
row like his prey. 

"Whatever they call me I never come," she 
smiled back at the distraught, unseeing figure, 
who crossed himself again hurriedly, calling on 
long-neglected saints to come to his aid in this 
awful crisis. 

"But, my liege," he gasped, scared out of his 
few wits at his own daring, "I can never, never 
marry an unchristian child to your sacred 
majesty." 

"Make no more ado; this is only the civil 
way," mused the king casually, thinking hard 
for the first time in his life. "Marry me quick, 
and you shall be chaplain royal for life and 
christen the queen whenever you will." 



128 

"Methinks 'tis a most uncivil way," muttered 
the priest under his breath, listening the while 
to a faint sound of kicking behind the hedge, 
fearing lest his rabbit soup and the king's 
promise should be alike uncertain. "And to 
marry at the saddle bow instead of at the 
altar — by all the saints ! 'tis irregular. But 
the king's word is law ; besides I will scourge me 
all night at my Aves and escape perdition if 
I may." 

Looking up at last and holding his life in 
both hands, still doubtful of his soul's salvation, 
he asked all in a quiver : 

"Wilt thou have this man to thy wedded 
husband, though he be the king?" forgetting in 
his distress to name his royal master first and 
shaking in his sandals as the enormity of it near 
overcame him. 

But the maid laughed outright, and looking 
happy Cophetua out of countenance said, "Can 
I ride this horse with you when I will?" 

"You can !" quoth the king, who would never 
learn grammar for all his tutors' tears, and 
was a match for the little queen-to-be in num- 
berless ways besides. 

I am sure you would laugh — you who are 



COPHETUA AND THE BEGGAR-MAID 129 

old and wise — at the simple things these two- 
now-one talked about all the long way home; 
the things concerning courts and lords and 
ladies that made the queen laugh, it was all so 
foolishly unlike the simple life she had led 
hitherto. Indeed, there were many things she 
couldn't so much as ask about, not knowing 
how. So she contented herself with pulling off 
the king's crown and setting it on her own head 
without a thought of her robes, and the first 
thing the frightened pages saw as Lucifer can- 
tered up to the palace gate was a queer some- 
thing all floating hair and fluttering rags wear- 
ing the sacred crown and stroking the bare, 
golden head that leaned to her. 

It was the court jester at last who told the 
unthinkable tale and was beaten for it ; and in- 
deed there was a terrible to-do along with the 
loss of the king and this new scandal; the 
chamberlain tearing his scant locks, and the 
high and mighty lords temporal breaking each 
others' heads, which was more to the purpose 
in a queerly conducted realm. 

But nobody dared fall upon the king who had 
created so great a diversion, so they all fell at 
his feet instead; while a page called one maid. 



130 

and she another and still another, all along the 
line of high and higher degree, till they reached 
a stately lady-in-waiting who took the little 
queen off, by royal order, to be washed and 
brushed and given over to the mistress of the 
robes. 

Time would fail me, even if I were able to tell 
how her majesty behaved at court or in hall; 
how she laughed in the faces of solemn lords 
temporal and still more solemn lords spiritual ; 
how she chose — and not only that but insisted 
upon — her own fantastic name at the font — a 
name so fantastic that all the ages since have 
called her simply after her low estate; and 
spattered the holy water in the meek chaplain's 
face, for Cophetua was as good as his royal 
word, which the poor priest knew was not 
always the case, and promoted him from hedge- 
row to chancel at once. 

The proper courtiers stood first on one foot 
and then shiftily on the other in overwhelming 
embarrassment when their queen ran races with 
the willing pages in the great courtyard, bare- 
foot and bareheaded, dropping the crown just 
where she happened to and tucking up her robes 
like a charwoman; and felt lumps in their 



COPHETUA AND THE BEGGAR-MAID 131 

throats when she changed suits with the king's 
fool and shook her bells in prelates' faces. But 
they were all blind and dumb when she sent off 
to the hut-with-the-pig-in-the-door more in a 
day than the cook and bottlewasher could con- 
trive to save in a week — and they no niggards. 
So at length the fond lad of a king growing 
sadly wise, as became his high estate, was 
minded to send his queen away to the court of 
France to be inoculated with manners. For the 
proud and mighty lords-in-waiting, to say 
nothing of the ladies, made unpleasantly de- 
risive faces when their queen of low and there- 
fore resented degree, ate in their presence with 
her small fingers — daintily washed to be sure — 
and threw the bones and whatever else she chose 
to the dogs under the table; and the haughty 
mistress of the robes swore a sacred oath that 
she would carry on her royal business in the 
rival kingdom across seas rather than demean 
herself to attend to the cleansing of cloth-of- 
gold robes degraded to napkin rank. 

So the dear king, more charming than ever, 
but mightily subdued in his proud spirit, sighed 
for mad love of his wild queen and fitted out a 
lordly ship to take her away for a year and a 



132 

day in all state and magnificence and with a 
great noble retinue. But lo ! when the time 
came and the ship fluttering with banners lay 
in the offing and all the king's bowmen and hal- 
berdiers stood in line from palace to harbor, my 
lady put on her crown which the fool had just 
found in a thicket, and the gold shoes she had 
been wading in, and climbed up to the very 
throne of Cophetua the Sad, with her glorious 
veil of hair about her knees, the splendor of her 
eyes and the joy of her pomegranate beauty 
so overcoming those who stood in the presence, 
and most of all the yearning king himself, 
that he raised his right hand and swore with a 
terrible oath that nothing in heaven above nor 
earth beneath — nor unspeakable regions below 
them both — should ever part her for a day from 
him whose very soul adored her as she was. 

And so, it is said, they lived long in bliss, 
though much I suspect as the creatures who 
wear feathers and fur only — and perhaps for 
that very reason; and the nobles grew thin and 
pale, and the people at large ruddy and fat as 
pampered pigs. 

The moral.? — Ah, who by searching can find 
out a moral.? Insubordination, unconvention- 



COPHETUA AND THE BEGGAR-MAID 133 

ality, conduct unbecoming a queen, — these 
reasons and many others there were, brought 
forward and urged in favor of the decree of 
banishment for a year and a day. And it may 
well be that in the hearts of the high and 
mighty lords there was a fond hope that, once 
out of sight, the king might put out of mind 
the compelling image of the beggar-maid and 
choose in her stead a queen of high degree. 

Yet the fact stands fast that even to this 
day all that can be said in extenuation of the 
queen's faults and the king's sudden change of 
mind is that they loved each other with might 
and main just as two common people may. 

So it has come to pass that these two, royal 
Cophetua and the nameless beggar-maid, have 
loitered hand in hand farther down the ages, 
giving and taking joy as they went, than any 
other crowned pair in Christendom. And this, 
at last, is the true moralless story of two young 
things playing at king and queen in the olden, 
golden days — very young things, who. Lord 
love us ! may have had their own special 
troubles like the best of us, without mentioning 
them. But whether the queen ever lost the 
bloom of her youth, the charm of her glorious 



beauty, or a particle of her liege's love — 
whether she grew old and dull and learned to 
do things like other folk, or stayed a child for- 
ever, we may not know. 



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